


Constellations of the Things We Left Unsaid

by DreamerInSilico



Series: Constellations [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Communication Failure, Fluff and Angst, Gabriel apparently likes flashback sequences because wow there are a lot of those, Grumpy Old Men, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunited lovers, Sombra is a helpful cyberpunk troll, aux pairings McGenji and Pharmercy if you squint, followed by hard-won communication success
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-07-23 22:25:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 24,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7482309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/pseuds/DreamerInSilico
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's one thing to realize from a distance that a faceless adversary used to be the person you loved most in the world.  It's another thing entirely to have that realization confirmed face-to-face, or mask-to-mask, as it were.  And another thing, still, to learn to talk to each other after realizing you'd never entirely had that one figured out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from the Lauren Aquilina song, "Talk to Me."
> 
> I cannot even with this two assholes, so have some fic.

The first time Soldier 76 catches a glimpse of black greatcoat and - was that a _skull mask?_ how ridiculously theatrical - on a conflict site, he doesn’t think much of it, beyond a mental eyeroll.  

The second time, Black Cloak is most definitely shooting at him, and he pays rather more attention.  The realization, as the Soldier dodges, that his adversary is wielding two heavily-modified shotguns tugs painfully at memories he wishes he could get rid of.  Memories of someone who should be as dead as he himself is supposed to be.  

Later, the intel gets to him, of a mysterious Talon agent, codename Reaper, who is systematically hunting down and killing former Overwatch members.  Soldier 76 tries a little harder not to remember, and to just focus on taking the bastard down if he ever gets the chance.  The alternative is too painful, and he has enough of that in his life to deal with as it is.  

 

* * *

 

Reaper has his suspicions the first time he sees the vigilante known as Soldier 76, and he tries to forget about them as he quits the field that day.  

That effort lasts all of twelve hours, after which he finds himself rather unwillingly pulling all the information on the man he can find.  It pisses him off that he is even bothering, and more so that part of himself is trying to justify it as “know thy enemy,” because if the _other_ parts are right, he knows this particularly enemy far, far too well already.  

The next time he gets a glimpse of “Soldier 76,” he tries to get closer.   _To get a good shot_ , he tells himself.  Never mind that the Soldier’s fighting style makes him a far more appropriate target for Widowmaker, and if Reaper really just wanted him dead, he’d give her a bead on his location instead.  

He doesn’t get close enough for a good shot, but he does get close enough to be certain of whom he’s looking at.  

_Morrison_ .   _Fucking hell, you bastard, you died in that explosion._  

_Just like I did._  

His sense of humor has always been dark, and these days it’s taken on a truly vicious edge.  He laughs at “Soldier 76,” but he laughs harder at himself.  

Maybe they won’t encounter each other again.  76 hasn’t ever been a specific target of his, not yet.  But that thought is not as comforting as part of him wants it to be, and his sense of drama insists that there is no way in hell they won’t run into each other again eventually.  

Morrison used to laugh at him for it, but his _abuela_ had called it “intuition,” instead, and it was right more often than not.

 

* * *

 

 The third time 76 sees Reaper across a warzone, he finds himself with a good shot lined up.  

The infra-sight on his visor has picked up a faint heat signature against the chill night air - whatever Reaper’s wearing, it’s masking his thermal output somewhat, apparently.  But it’s hard to hide from Soldier 76 at night if you have a pulse, no matter how chilly the blood in your veins might seem to be.  He sees the heat signature and then… just for a moment, the would-be phantom flits through an area of slightly thinner shadow, and he’s sure it is the man who’s been stalking him.  

Haunting him, even.

Reyes would have made that joke, once.  The man who no longer calls himself Jack Morrison wonders if his old… _comrade_ … is making that joke to himself now.  

Reyes - _Reaper_ \- hasn’t seen him yet, or at least seems unaware of his current position.  ( _It’s too open; he must be.)_ He stops at the crumbling corner of a decrepit building, watching, and he’s in range.  

Soldier 76’s visor has a lock on the man.  

It’s a perfect shot.

He doesn’t take it.  

 

* * *

 

 The next time the two dead men end up on the same battlefield, it’s a total, ridiculous accident that brings them in close proximity.  In visual range.  In _shotgun_ range.  

Each man knows, deep in his gut, that this was not supposed to happen.  

They stare directly - or as direct as such a stare can be, with both men’s faces obscured by masks - at one another in the eerie silence of those whose lives have at many times depended upon stealth.  They’ve been circling one another clandestinely for months, yet this… feels like far too much.  If they acknowledge each other, they have to start shooting, right?  

The moment stretches out until the tension practically hums through the air, an overloaded circuit just before it sparks and shorts - and then the short happens.  With a flutter of a black overcoat, Reaper is gone, and 76 is left staring at the place where he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a heartbeat ago.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2 is incoming as soon as I can get the draft cleaned up! I'm hoping to keep this on a pretty brisk update schedule. Intended length is under 10k, but we'll see how things go. 
> 
> This will showcase some rather different headcanons for Reaper than I've seen elsewhere; the supernatural-ish bent of what little lore there is for his current form doesn't sit well with me in an otherwise fairly grounded setting. So I'm going with some biological weirdness + smoke and mirrors-tech rather than "can literally take gaseous form and teleport."


	2. Chapter 2

On another day, another battlefield, Reaper gets hit.  

It’s not a thing that happens often, thanks to the Wraith 1.1 short-burst holographic projector tech that lets him confuse and evade his opponents when things get a little too hairy.  But it does happen, and this time it’s bad, even with his enhanced (and later, re-enhanced) healing abilities thanks to a super-soldier program and a round of emergency nanotherapy gone distinctly weird.  

Stupid,  _ stupid. _  He’s gotten too used to relying on the Wraith, stopped keeping in mind, every moment, that bullets and grenades aren’t his only worries in some of the zones where he’s been fighting.  He had been thinking - brooding, really - during a lull in the combat, and hadn’t been paying quite as much attention as he normally does to where he was walking.  

The frag mine was small, amateurish, really.  But it was still a frag mine, and he still has what feels like a hundred small pieces of shrapnel in his body, as well as two really nasty big ones - one in the meat of his thigh ( _ not too bad; there would be a lot more blood already if it had hit an artery or major vein _ ), and one in his back, as he’d stepped almost fully over the damned thing.  

He fervently hopes for a moment that it didn’t hit a kidney, then laughs, very quietly, harshly, tiredly as he slumps down with one shoulder against a dirty concrete wall to see if he can pull enough metal out of himself to drag himself to a safehouse.  

His perpetual death-wish is a fickle thing, and right now it seems to be taking the day off.  More’s the pity.  

What makes it worse is the damning knowledge of what thoughts had had him so distracted to begin with: he hasn’t been able to stop remembering his brief, startled encounter with Soldier 76 -  _ Jack _ \- that occurred three weeks previously, and he growls, because there are still images in his head that he truly does not want anything to do with.  Even worse ones than those he’d been obsessing over - now he’s seeing Jack’s young, concerned face beside his infirmary bunk twenty-something years ago, when they had been young and dancing around feelings that…

Reaper snarls and yanks the largest shard from his thigh in one swift jerk.  The pain makes him see stars, but he welcomes it, because at least now he’s not seeing the past.  

Still half-reeling from pain, he reaches behind himself gingerly to go for the other big one, then bites back an actual outcry as his clawed gauntlets graze the thing at the wrong angle and it digs in a bit sideways.  

_ Shit _ .  

He’s flexible enough that he can reach the shard, but he certainly can’t see it, can’t make out its precise shape and the orientation in which it’s embedded in his flesh well enough to remove it with the kind of swift confidence he’d had with the first big shard.  It has to come out, though, so he tries again, and this time, can’t avoid a pained grunt as he withdraws his hand again.  

If he dies (for real, this time) to that stupid frag grenade, he’s going to be  _ so _ pissed off.  

Reaper’s right gauntlet is off and he’s scrabbling weakly at one of the many pockets in his bodysuit for the tiny adrenaline and anesthetic injector he carries - good for giving enough of an endurance burst to get out of a bad situation and then deal with injuries - when he hears a boot’s light scrape against the ground and a new shadow blocks out what little sepia lamplight there is in the alcove.  The hand at his pocket darts for a gun instead, but he hisses in pain and doesn’t quite succeed in raising it as the damaged muscles in his back mount a spectacular protest.  He’s pretty sure he’s going to die here.  

And then he looks up enough to make out the shadow’s owner, and he’s  _ absolutely  _ sure he’s going to die here.  

But “Soldier 76” is just staring down at him, unmoving.  

“C’mon, then,” Reaper grates out, though his voice fails to hit the mocking note he’s aiming for.  “What are you waiting for?”  

The Soldier swears under his breath, voice showing just as much age and bitterness as Reaper’s.  “Fucking hell, Reyes.  What happened to you?”  

It shouldn’t surprise him that the Soldier knows who he is ( _ was _ ), given how he’s been sure it was Jack Morrison behind that visor for months, but still.  Reaper’s laughing now, a harsh, wheezing sound that hurts to make as every huff of breath disturbs the metal shard in his back.  “When?”  

“Tonight,” Soldier 76 clips back, apparently coming to a decision and taking the few steps to close the distance between them before dropping to one knee.  

“Frag mine.”  

“You’re getting sloppy.”  His lined, rugged face is almost completely obscured by the mask and visor, but Gabriel can see the disapproving scowl in his mind’s eye easily enough, and if his hackles weren’t up before, they sure are now.  

“You said that for years.  Only got sloppy enough to get myself killed the one time, unless you count tonight,” he growls.  Morrison can surely hear his own scowl, hidden as it is behind the bone-white mask.  

The Soldier goes still in a way that communicates his glare, then shakes his head.  “You’re not dying tonight.”  

“Really.”  The word is harsh in its flatness.  

Morrison sighs.  “Really.  What’s the worst of all this?”  A grungy-gloved hand gestures at Gabriel’s injuries.  

Gabriel just looks at him, and Morrison loses his patience.  

“What do you expect me to do, fucking shoot you?” he hisses.  “Or worse, let you bleed out or die of infection when you don’t get all the crap out of your skin?  I’m gonna bet you don’t have a medevac team on standby, do you?”  

Hot fury rises in Gabriel’s chest, and with it, a pain utterly different from and far surpassing that of his injuries.  “I don’t need your fucking  _ pity _ ,” he spits out, voice a jagged-edged snarl.  

“You don’t have it.  But I’m not leaving you here to die, Reyes.  I ca-  … I’m not.”  There is a hitch in his words as he repeats the last phrase.  

Somehow it’s almost worse than actual pity.  Gabriel knows how to deal with that - pure, unadulterated hatred.  But that isn’t something he’s managed to feel for Morrison in a long, long time.  

“What’s the worst of it?” Morrison repeats, and Gabriel grunts as he shifts a bit more to better expose his back.  He tells himself that if his old comrade is stupid enough not to kill him, he’s going to take advantage of it, because not to would make him just as stupid as Morrison.  

That’s all it is.  

“Shit.”  

“You’re telling me,” Gabriel mutters.  He can feel Morrison’s eyes on him, on the wound, assessing.  

“How bad.”  

Gabriel hisses, this time in frustration as much as hostility.  “How the fuck am I supposed to know?  I’m still alive.  It hurts like a knife in the back.  Probably hasn’t pierced any vital organs because this happened about half an hour ago and I’m still lucid.”  

He thinks, anyway.  Maybe he’s hallucinating.  That would be more dignified, if not as medically helpful.  

“Alright.”  Morrison’s voice has smoothed out a bit, into a tone Gabriel recognizes and, right now, utterly loathes.  The Good Commander voice.  

God exists, and is an asshole.  

“Count of three, I’m pulling it out, okay?”  He doesn’t wait for an acknowledgement before he starts counting.  “One…”   _ Yank _ .  

Gabriel snarls, vision going dark around the edges even as his hand forms an obscene gesture at Morrison.  The ‘before you tense up’ trick.  He both wishes he’d remembered, and is grateful that he didn’t.  “Fuck you, old man,” he hisses through the pain.  

“Fuck you, too.  Any more like that?”  

He shakes his head slightly, slowly, and it’s all he can do not to black out.  

When his eyes find focus again, Morrison is tugging a yellow canister out of its storage loop on his arm and popping the end off with a practiced motion.  The thing sheds a soft yellow glow over a few square feet of space, and the pain recedes significantly.  Biotic field emitter.  Just now he’s annoyingly, pathetically grateful for Morrison’s expensive habit of carrying those around, as he can feel it coaxing exposed nerve endings into quiescence and ripped blood vessels to seal off.  

“Digging the rest of this junk out of you is probably an hour-long job,” the man informs him after a moment, still in that infuriatingly calm, neutral tone.  

“No shit, Sherlock.”  

Morrison continues as if he didn’t even hear the retort, which pisses Gabriel off even more.  “And that’s time I don’t think either one of us has in this warzone.”  

Gabriel digs steel claws into the crumbling wall to haul himself roughly to his feet.  Obviously startled by the sudden movement, Morrison puts a hand on his gun, though he doesn’t quite aim it at Gabriel, yet.  

“I can move with that big piece out of my back,” Gabriel grits out through his teeth.  The rest hurts like the devil, but that kind of pain is something he’s certainly no stranger to.  “And I’m not going to shoot you, either.”  

Nor is he going to fucking thank him, though.  

Morrison just nods and pushes to his feet as well, a bit more slowly.  Stiffly?  Gabriel finally smirks, just a little, from the safety of his mask and hood, as he turns to go.  

“Gabriel….”  His name is rough and quiet from behind Morrison’s faceplate, and he clenches his jaw but turns enough to look back at the man, who is now just standing there.  Watching him, in a way that should be inscrutable, but Gabriel still knows this man’s body language far too well.  He tries not to notice it.  

After a moment’s silence, Morrison just shakes his head, turns on his heel, and strides off.  He doesn’t pause, or look back.  

Reaper bares his teeth behind his mask, feeling like an idiot for pausing, himself.  


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave myself emotional whiplash writing this. Come suffer with me.

Jack Morrison forces his feet to keep moving, not to hesitate, not to turn around again as he walks away from Reaper.   _ Gabriel _ .  He doesn’t really want to find out what he’ll say if he looks at the man again.  Not right now.  

It’s one thing to know from a distance that a faceless adversary used to be the person you loved most in the world.  Turns out it’s something else entirely to have that knowledge confirmed by direct interaction.  

Jack hurts.  He’s tired and he fucking hurts, and not in the “creaky joints and cranky scars” kind of way that he’s been used to for years, but the fresh, bright, and bleeding hurt that he’s spent the last five years smothering into something dull and distant, as best he’s been able.  

But Gabriel Reyes is alive and they  _ talked _ tonight, kind of, and now everything hurts and it isn’t fucking  _ fair _ because now Jack can’t stop thinking about him.  Thinking about  _ them _ back before everything started going to shit.  Back when they trusted each other, relied on each other.  (For a moment, his mind adds,  _ loved each other _ , but telling himself that that ever actually stopped is a bridge too far from his end.  Which thought brings on another wave of bitterness, because he’s pretty sure that Gabe did stop loving  _ him _ .)  

The man who was Jack Morrison had thought he’d set aside all the wild hopes he’d entertained after the explosion at the Swiss HQ, but this encounter with Gabriel brought it all back in spades.  Worse, even, in a way, since previously just the idea that Gabriel was still alive seemed like a wild hope in and of itself.  

On the third consecutive night that thoughts of Gabriel keep him awake, Jack finally pushes up from his old military-issue bedroll and does something about it.  Ten minutes of fiddling and stewing over words later, he has a very short message scraped into the biodegradable plastic casing of one of his biotic emitters - no words, but a set of GPS coordinates, and a date.  

It’s a stupid decision, probably, but it does calm his mind enough to finally sleep.  Tomorrow, he will start actively hunting the Reaper.  

 

* * *

 

Three days after the frag mine, Reaper’s fully-healed skin only hurts as much as it always does, instead of being riddled with the fresh pain of embedded metal shards.  He has whatever the fuck Angela did to resuscitate him after the explosion in Geneva to thank for both how fast the injuries healed, and the fact that the pain never really goes away.  

Everything always hurts; it’s only a matter of how much.  And right now the part that hurts the most is a memory - or rather, a great many of them.  

 

...

 

_ A fluff of blond hair; wide, guileless blue eyes - Gabriel’s new bunkmate might actually be the whitest boy he’s ever seen.  When he handles Gabriel’s teasing with amiable aplomb, though, Gabriel thinks that maybe, this guy’s alright.   _

 

_... _

 

_ There are Overwatch posters, now, like they’re some kind of fucking superheroes.   _

_ Or Jack is, anyway.  And Angela and Reinhardt and Torbjorn.  Gabriel and Blackwatch, not so much.   _

_ The first time Gabriel sees the one with the picture of Jack front-and-center, blue longcoat streaming behind him while he stares steadfastly into the distance, he tastes bile.  Jack is  _ absolutely _ the whitest man he’s ever seen, and even halfway through the twenty-first century, that still matters, especially where they come from.  Jack Morrison: the All-American Dreamboat.  Gabriel Reyes: the shadow who makes sure Dreamboat’s hands stay squeaky clean.   _

_ While Overwatch marches in parades and swoops in to save the day from universal foes, Blackwatch is the knife in the darkness, the ugly truth of global politics in a world of grey, and black, and blacker.  It didn’t start out this way, but more than half of Blackwatch’s roster is like Jesse, now - conscripted former criminals, given a chance at “redemption.”  But it’s a cruel joke; there’s no redemption to be found here.  Just a group of very, very deadly “deniable assets” whom the world won’t mourn when they inevitably die on an op.   _

_ The suits knew exactly what they were doing when they set it up this way, and Gabriel’s hated them for it since day one.   _

_ He wasn’t angry at Jack at first, not really.   _

_ At first. _

 

_ … _

 

_ When they start the SEP, by whim of whatever bored administrator or computer program that does the bunk assignments, they are split up, with half a hallway and an offset training and medical schedule between them. _

_ This lasts all of two days, when after the first round of injections, they stumble, sweating, into the admin offices and demand reassignment.  They signed on as a package deal, and they’re not going through this hell apart.   _

_ The man behind the desk looks at them like they’re a pair of petulant children, but their present roommates call in and say by all fucking means, rearrange things, so he does.  (They’re nice enough guys, and they realized very quickly that they were a third and fourth wheel to the pair even when Gabriel and Jack were physically separated.)   _

_ As upset as they both were at the first set of assignments, neither soldier had quite realized what a relief it would be to share space again until the reassignment went through.  That night, they end up shivering together in one cramped bed.  They’ve never done that before, yet it doesn’t seem to require discussion.   _

_ Gabriel is so strung-out from the assault of the strange chemicals in his bloodstream, and so relieved by the feeling of Jack’s muscular frame nestled against his chest that he doesn’t even worry that things will be weird in the morning.   _

 

_ … _

 

_ “I’m having to answer a lot of questions about you to Command.” _

_ The blond hair is slightly faded with grey - cornsilk more than sunshine, now, and his eyes have learned how to be cold and hard, even to Gabriel.  Sometimes it seems as though it’s  _ especially _ to Gabriel.   _

_ But Gabriel has always known how to be cold and hard, and his time as Blackwatch commander has done nothing but hone that already-sharp skill.   _

_ “Are you.”  His arms are crossed, one forearm half-covered by a synth-skin bandage that has recently been applied over an extremely nasty burn.  “Maybe you should be asking some questions  _ for _ me,  _ cabrón _ , huh?  Like whether those fucking suits wouldn’t really rather just execute my people and get it the fuck over with, if they don’t like my way of dealing with the death-traps they’re sending us into.”   _

_ “There were four civilian casualties.”   _

_ “And three goddamn terrorist cells.  The intel we were given only identified one.  But they’re all gone anyway, because that’s my fucking job.”  He takes a slow breath, tries to force himself to calm.  He needs Morrison to take him seriously, and he’s not really sure how to get him to do that, anymore.  (How did they get here?)  “I’m telling you, Jack, there was something fishy about the whole thing, and I’ve felt like that with ops before.  They were too well-prepared, and we shouldn’t have been sent in with as little intel as we had.”  (How did they break?) _

_ Morrison purses his lips, and Gabriel’s stomach knots, frustration and anger bubbling up toward his chest.   _

_ “I’ll see what I can find out, Reyes, quietly.  Okay?”   _

_ It’s the same bullshit he gave him after the last time this happened.   _

_ Angry as Gabriel is, he doesn’t want to think Morrison -  _ Jack _ \- might truly be part of the rot that he can feel eating away at Overwatch day by day, mission by mission.  He doesn’t want to think it, but this time, for a moment, he does.   _

 

_ … _

 

_ They’ve been sharing a bunk for two weeks, and it was easy and natural at first, but there is a pressure building, some invisible thread slowly stretching tighter and tighter between them.  They still haven’t talked about it at all, haven’t managed to wonder aloud what is going on.   _

_ Gabriel feels like he can barely breathe when Jack catches his eyes, so he starts avoiding them, even though they still share space and words and touch.  (And pain.  Every time they start to recover from one round of treatments, it’s already time for the next one.)  _

_ This only makes the tension worse, ultimately.  He can tell it’s bothering Jack, and he feels bad about it, but can’t make himself break it.  He’s not afraid of his desires - or his feelings - exactly, but of how things might change for the worse if he gives them voice.   _

_ One night, though, Jack catches him off-guard.  They’re in bed, for the moment lying close, but not quite pressed together because Gabriel is sweating through an overheated phase of this sadistic medical routine they’re somehow almost used to, by now.  Gabriel is struggling to clear his mind enough to sleep when he hears Jack’s strained whisper.  “...Gabe?”   _

_ “Yeah?” he rasps, and Jack turns over to face him.  He can’t turn over, himself, or otherwise retreat without being insultingly obvious about it, so he steels himself but remains, eyes sweeping his best friend’s face in trepidation and concern for that note of  _ something _ he heard in Jack’s voice.   _

_ Jack’s gaze is drinking him in, as if Gabriel is the one with the pools of cool water for eyes, and not him.  “What is this?” he asks quietly after a tense pause.  “What are we doing?”   _

_ Gabriel can’t help but smirk through his discomfort and give the smartass answer, much as he knows this isn’t the time.  “Getting poked and prodded like lab rats every day because our dumb asses went and signed up to be supersoldiers, mostly.”   _

_ He rolls his eyes and clarifies, “What are we doing, right now?” _

_ “Lying in bed, trying to get comfortable.” _

_ His lips tighten as if in an attempt to smile, but don’t quite make it there, and Gabriel swallows hard, regretting the sarcasm.  “Yeah, but I mean….”  Jack hisses out a pained breath, shakes his head a little, and shifts as if to roll back over.  “Never mind.”   _

_ A flash of panic, strangely strong, and Gabriel reaches out to grasp Jack’s shoulder to stop him.  “Hey.”  He sighs tiredly, softly, searching Jack’s face and chewing at his own lip.  “I know what you meant.  And the answer is… whatever you want it to be,  _ cariño _.”  If Jack spoke Spanish, the endearment would make it pretty clear what Gabriel wanted, had wanted for frankly too damn long already, but he knows the other man doesn’t.   _

_ Jack is watching him, and the moment becomes a fragile thing.  “Whatever I want.”   _

_ “Whatever you want,” Gabriel repeats quietly, with a sort of seriousness he rarely uses with anyone - not the sternness of a military officer and certified human weapon, but something softer.  Warmer.   _

_ “You mean that?” _

_ “Do I say things I don’t mean?” _

_ Jack finally manages to crack a smile.  “All the time, asshole.”   _

_ Gabriel smirks again, ruefully, in response.  “Fine, fair enough.  But I promise you…”  Jack is looking at him with such bright  _ hope _ that his breath catches in his throat.  “I’m completely serious,” he manages, even more quietly, and then… fuck it.  He’s going to… yeah.  And then Jack can slap him or whatever but this is happening right now.   _

_ Without letting himself think any further, he leans in, and catches Jack’s lips with his own.   _

_ There is a pause, like Jack is figuring out what to do, and Gabriel almost pulls away, but then… fire.  Jack’s lips and tongue meet his in an instinctive, intimate dance, and it’s so good and such a  _ relief  _ that for the first half-minute Gabriel is mildly afraid that he’ll let the moisture gathering in his eyes fall.   _

 

_ … _

 

_ “It’s like I don’t even know you, these days,” Jack says, his posture tense, eyes accusing from across his (enormous, orderly) desk.   _

_ Gabriel lets out a humorless bark of a laugh and turns to go, shaking his head at the idea that that was news.  “You don’t.” _

 

_ … _

 

_ “Gabriel…”  His name is rough and quiet from behind Morrison’s faceplate, and he clenches his jaw but turns enough to look back at the man, who is now just standing there.  Watching him, in a way that should be inscrutable, but Gabriel still knows this man’s body language far too well.  He tries not to notice it.   _

_ After a moment’s silence, Morrison just shakes his head, turns on his heel, and strides off.  He doesn’t pause, or look back.   _

 

_ … _

 

Reaper hisses his frustration and pushes up from his cot.  Seeing no point in continuing to attempt sleep, he settles down at his portable terminal.

Jack should have stayed dead.

They both should have.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The memory bits kind of ran away with me and now I want to write other fics that deal with their early relationship........
> 
> Help save me I have too many plot bunnies.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: oblique reference to past child abuse, graphic violence

The sun is just beginning to set over the half-gutted husk of a town not far from the old Gibraltar base, and Reaper isn’t aware of Soldier 76’s distant presence ( _ sloppy, so sloppy) _ until he hears something fall with a clatter into the debris near him and dodges, expecting a grenade.  When there’s no explosion, he cautiously looks out from cover and sees something small, plastic, in a familiar bright yellow shade.  

_ Morrison. _  He grits his teeth, reminding himself that biotic emitters aren’t so rare that it had to have come from one specific person, by any means - but upon closer inspection, biotic emitters of this particular brand (he’d passively noted the make of the one Morrison had used on him weeks past - even intel as simple as that could sometimes yield useful insights into where someone was spending their time and their money), and crudely engraved with a message, no less…

Well, he had already known there would be another encounter of some sort, hadn’t he?  

He tells himself he’ll carefully consider the question of whether or not to accept the rendezvous invitation, but some part of him already knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will go.  

 

* * *

 

Jack doesn’t have the opportunity to wait and see if Reyes picked up the biotic emitter, because just as he tosses it from his vantage point halfway up a squat, derelict shop building, his visor picks up an infrared laser sight.  It’s only his enhanced reflexes, trained to a hair-trigger by decades of combat experience, that allow him to drop and roll back into cover before the sniper gets the shot off.  The thick, padded leather of his jacket is ample protection from the chunks of broken tile and other debris in his path, but he mutters a curse under his breath as he pushes to his feet, aching from the impact.  

Getting old -  _ being  _ old, if he’s honest; the “getting” part was over years ago - is shit.

He doesn’t risk giving the sniper another look at him, wherever they are.  They could be hunting him specifically or it could have been an opportunistic moment, but given his general circumstances it’s best to assume the former and quietly get the hell out of dodge.  He’s done the thing he tracked Reyes here to do.  

The implications of the location are potentially interesting, but only a little; he’s long-since visited the old base, scavenged what few supplies he could find, and made sure there wasn’t anything of import for Talon or Vishkar or whoever else to pick up if they hadn’t already.  It’s ten days until the proposed meeting time - technically long enough to go back to his “home” base in the States if he wanted, but since the rendezvous point is in London, it doesn’t seem worth the jet lag for a short visit.  Instead, he’ll take a train north through France and Germany to check up on a couple of recent leads, and then make his way to the London safehouse… where he doesn’t let himself consider the possibility that Reyes might not show up.  

 

...

 

He  _ does _ let himself consider the possibility that Reyes might  _ set _ him up.  Given that, to all appearances, the man’s been working with Talon lately, it would be patently stupid not to.  So Jack heads for his safehouse a solid four days in advance of the meeting time to scope it out, planning to take a hotel room nearby rather than actually staying there, for the present.  He picks up a tail in Munich but manages to ditch them before crossing the Channel over to the UK; evading people out to put his head on the proverbial pike has become thoroughly routine in his years as a legally dead vigilante.  

It’s become so routine, in fact, that he doesn’t really give a second thought to how abnormally easy it is to lose this one, and that’s the mistake that ultimately screws him, though he won’t realize it for quite a while.  

Everything is in order at and around the safehouse when Jack arrives in London.  He settles into the hotel under one of several rotating aliases and does his best to keep busy with research, but on the day before the rendezvous, he’s too restless to focus.  The safehouse is stocked with non-perishables, of course, but just to have something to do, he goes grocery shopping and picks up enough fresh food for a couple of meals.  

_ Optimistic of you, soldier _ .  He’s shaking his head at himself, but he does it anyway; it can’t hurt.  

What can and does hurt, however, is the gun butt to the base of the skull while he’s putting his purchases away.  It takes a lot to knock Jack Morrison out cold, and this doesn’t, but it does daze him enough that he only manages to stab one of his assailants with his utility knife before they subdue him.  

“ _ Son of a bitch! _ ” the man hisses, clutching his bloody shoulder.  

“Leave my mother outta this,” Jack mumbles blearily as a woman clamps a set of rigid metal cuffs on his wrists and forearms.  That earns him a snarl and a backhanded pistol-whip across the face, and he feels his lower lip split badly enough to leave blood dribbling down his chin.  

Through the haze of pain and adrenaline, there seems to be three of them in total, though he supposes there could be more outside.  None of them are Reyes, but he doesn’t know if he should be relieved about that or not.  

He doesn’t  _ think _ Reyes would sell him out but not bother to show up himself, if only to gloat.  It’s too impersonal, and where one would normally associate ruthlessness with an impersonal manner, in Reyes’s case it was always how very  _ personal _ he had a habit of making everything that had made him such a terrifying operative.  Jack supposes that could change, though; everything else in his life certainly has, long since.  

“Oh, you’re gonna be  _ wishing  _ your mommy was here when we get going on you.”  The words are ugly, guttural, no doubt intended to be menacing, and Jack almost,  _ almost _ lets out a weary laugh.  

His mother never protected him from anything; if she was still alive he doubted she’d start now, even were she standing right in the room.  

Instead of the traditional chair-tying, the operatives (Talon?  He’s pretty sure they’re Talon) drive a couple of durasteel spikes into the concrete floor and use those as anchor points to keep him in place, on his knees.  It is a damned good thing, he reflects, that his standard-wear pants have some padding there, though they’re still sore as shit by the end of the first hour.  

Several hours pass, and they make no move to interrogate him - he gathers that they’re waiting for some kind of transport arrangement that’s been delayed - but they take out their bored aggression on him at irregular intervals, each time leaving new bruises and a little more blood.  Testing the security of his restraints earns him another beating, but he does manage to shift from his knees to curl on his side in the process, damp white hair leaving an imprint of sweat and blood on the concrete.  He doesn’t respond to their taunts.  All his smartass reserves were spent in the one early spark of defiance; now he is simply tired, in pain, and increasingly dehydrated as he awaits either the incoming transport or a chance to turn the tables.  

Eventually his captors decide to help themselves to the groceries he brought in, and leave him alone long enough that he dozes lightly, in and out, and he’d almost prefer their torment to the one of jerking awake in a panic over and over and over again.  Jack has always had the proverbial soldier’s ability to fall asleep anywhere, but falling asleep and staying asleep are two very, very different things.  Six years of essentially living on the run after a bomb took out the closest thing he had to a home (and, he thought at the time, the closest  _ person _ he’d ever had to a home, too, even though they had been estranged for years by that point) certainly hadn’t helped matters.  

He dreams of running through cornfields in full tactical gear.  He dreams of team ops going bad.  He dreams of the world exploding around him.  

And he dreams of Gabriel.  

Gabriel, showing up at the safehouse.  Sometimes it’s to collect Jack and his captors to return them to a Talon base.  Sometimes it’s to rescue him, instead.  And sometimes it’s just to laugh and walk away.  

The umpteenth time he wakes up from one of these dreams, it’s to a sharp kick in the ribs.  “Shut  _ up _ , old man,” the woman who had bound him so securely earlier growls.  “Fuck’s sake, you’re pathetic.”  

Jack barely hears her.  He’s shaking, gulping air, focusing on the pain from the kick because it’s anchoring him in the waking world and he doesn’t want to drift off again.  The sense of unreality is nauseating - or maybe it’s the hunger and dehydration.  Either way, he feels like a sun-baked pile of shit.  

It’s several minutes before he calms down enough to push himself up into a seated position.  He wants to rest his head in his hands, but they’re still bound behind his back, so he stays upright, staring past the two captors guarding him toward the short stairway leading up to the safehouse door.  Trying to regulate his breathing, trying re-center.  

_ Focus.  Endure. _

When he sees the shadow on the wall at the stairs, at first he thinks he’s somehow managed to fall asleep, yet again, and he sighs, near-silently, blinking hard.  But no, he is awake this time, and the shadow is a man in a hooded coat, ghost-silent despite the heavy boots he wears as he steps off the last stair.

The Talon operatives are seated on opposite sides of the small room, one on Jack’s cot and the other on a chair.  The woman must hear something, because she pushes to her feet and turns, drawing breath -- 

  
And without even turning his head to look straight at either of them, Reaper lifts his shotguns and fires off two rounds in quick succession, spattering blood and brain matter from both guards against the dreary concrete walls.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of me is sorry I keep posting fairly short chapters, but this fic's rhythm has a damn mind of its own, far more than most that I write. Not entirely sure why!
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave kudos and/or comments - they really perk me up and help me keep pushing. I love this fandom so much.


	5. Chapter 5

It was with an all-too-familiar sort of rage that Gabriel had realized a Talon cell had taken the safehouse where he was supposed to meet Jack - not the sick, smoldering thing he’d felt through the declining years of Overwatch and after the Geneva bombing, but something white-hot and righteous.  It was the rage that had always risen to cover and compensate for the horrible  _ fear _ of seeing Jack wounded or in immediate danger.  (Very immediate, of course - he hadn’t been a fucking mother hen, or they wouldn’t have been able to do ops together at all, in the early days.)  A bit hypocritical, a part of him had mused, given that only months previously he had been casually shooting at the man, himself, but Gabriel Reyes was also not the sort of man to let that make him second guess his actions.  

He  _ was _ the sort of man to be coincidingly furious with Jack for making him fucking  _ feel _ that way again, but that wasn’t going to stop him, either.

Gabriel has always had a complicated relationship with subtlety, but the only somewhat-attentive two guards they’d set to cover the building had died swiftly and silently, with broken necks, before he’d stalked into the safehouse itself.  The corpses of the two agents he just shot are slumped to either side of him, but he’s not looking at them now any more than he did when he shot them.  His eyes are on Jack, his blood very reluctantly cooling to a simmer.  

“You always have known how to make an entrance.”  Jack’s voice is rough and weary, but Gabriel can hear a hint of fondness in it (and  _ see _ it in the crinkles around his unmasked eyes), and that raises old emotions again, makes him want to lash out in retaliation for the pang that comes with them.  But the instinct to banter hits him just as hard.

_ And you always did look good tied up, _ he almost replies, but clenches his jaw, holding the words in.  They’re too friendly, too intimate, too damn  _ easy _ even after the fucked up years between them.  Instead he watches Jack in silence for a moment, tossing his guns to the side.  Jack lets out a huff of air that is probably a snort.

Still quiet, unwillingly captivated by his first sight of Jack’s face - and all the unfamiliar age and scars it holds - since the explosion, he takes another step forward and reaches out with one wickedly-clawed, gloved hand to lightly, almost gingerly grasp the man’s chin and tilt it up to look at him better.  

Checking for signs of a concussion or something, of course.

The hint of a reaction that flits through Jack’s slightly clouded, cornflower eyes makes Gabriel drop the contact as if burned.  

“They do anything worse than rough you up a bit?” he manages to ask after few seconds, in even more of a growl than usual.  

A little of the tension seems to leave Jack’s posture at that, and he shakes his head.  “I’m sore and dehydrated and pissed off, but nothing worse than that.  It’d be fucking dandy if you could get these cuffs off me, though.  Think the woman with her brains leaking out on my bed had the key.”  

Gabriel nods and moves to the corpse to rifle through her pockets.  He finds the key-chit readily enough and returns to free Jack’s arms - the cuffs are the heavy-duty kind more akin to joined bracers than the dinky little things cops use, which shows some prudence on the dead agents’ part, for all the good that did them.  

Jack lets out a grunt and flexes his wrists when he is finally free to move his hands out from behind his back again, and Gabriel is already going for where he knows a stash of bottled water will be.  Jack is nothing if not consistent in how he organizes his living spaces, which consistency bears out when Gabriel finds the bottles and tosses one over to Jack.  

“How long did they have you?”  A safe question.  

“Lost track of time, but since Tuesday afternoon,” Jack replies, twisting off the cap without looking.  His eyes are fixed assessingly, unnervingly upon Gabriel, who is at the moment grateful for the shelter of his mask.  

“Fourteen hours, then, give or take.  It’s about eleven hundred on Wednesday now.  What the hell were they even doing, sitting around with their thumbs up their asses for that long?” Gabriel observes in disgust as Jack gulps water.  

He thinks he sees a hint of a smirk on Jack’s lips.  “Waiting for a transport, s’what I gathered.  All your coworkers like this?”  

Gabriel hisses out a breath, rolling his eyes, which expression Jack will hear even if he can’t see it.  “They’re not ‘my’ anything, _cabrón_.  I’m a private fucking contractor.”  

“Mmn,” is all Jack says in response.  

Gabriel is irritable and mountingly restless in the aftermath of protective fury, and he’s still ambiently pissed at Jack for inciting it in the first place.  He bites back any extended commentary on where Jack can stick his opinions of the company Gabriel does or doesn’t keep in favor of jerking his head toward the door.  “We need to get outta here before the stooges’ backup finally comes, then.  I’ve got a safehouse of my own in the city.  We’ll go there.”

“Alright,” is all Jack says, still watching him.

 

* * *

 

Two hours of winding their way halfway across the city in near-silence, and they’re deep in the dead zone from the war, where the reconstruction efforts haven’t managed to reach, yet.  Gabriel’s safehouse, it turns out, is the still-secure undercroft of a bombed-out church, and Jack has to bite his tongue on the way through the shell of the upper building (crunching over shards of stained glass, and winding their way among splintered pews) to keep from pointing out how this place couldn’t be more fucking  _ Gabriel _ if he’d tried.  

He probably did try, come to think of it.  Which observation Jack keeps even more firmly to himself.  

While it’s obvious that Gabriel came to the initial meeting with the intention of at least a temporary truce, and still gives enough of a damn about Jack to save his ass from the organization he has most definitely been working  _ with _ , if not  _ for _ (or maybe he just can’t stand the thought of some chumps taking Jack down instead of him - that would be a very Gabriel attitude, as well)....  Well, Jack’s going to be cautious.  He certainly has no reason to believe the other man has any less of a temper than he used to.  

Jack is half-expecting the place to be lit by actual flaming torches, but Gabriel flicks a switch to turn on dim LED lights instead, revealing a space that’s a curious mishmash of ancient, vaulted stonework and modern modifications.  There has to be a generator somewhere, which isn’t surprising, he supposes.  Melodramatic as Gabriel might be, he’s not that impractical.  

When they’re standing in the sparsely-furnished chamber, Gabriel crosses his arms over his chest and grunts a simple, “So?”  

So, indeed.  

Jack lets out a silent sigh, nodding a bit, more to himself than to his former partner.  “So… you’re alive,” he tries lamely.  

“Thanks, Captain fucking Obvious.  So are you.  US government spent a shitload of money back in the day making us both really hard to kill, I’m sure you remember.”  

Frowning now, Jack drops tiredly onto a bench that’s probably a much better-preserved specimen of the old wooden pews, and shakes his head.  “I.”  He swallows, trying to clear the lump that rises in his throat.  Angry and betrayed as he’d felt, seeing Gabriel’s broken body was still one of if not his absolute worst memory.  “I saw you, in the rubble, Gabriel.  There was no way…”  

“Heaven didn’t want me, and Hell knew I’d take over.”

“Heh.”  He laughs weakly, watching Gabriel’s still-masked form leaning with deceptive casualness against an archway.  “Smart of ‘em.”  

There is a pause, like Gabriel doesn’t know what to do with that agreement, and Jack considers that a point on his side.  He’s about to pursue the matter further, when Gabriel asks, “Why did you want to meet?”  

“Why did you come?” he counters, without really thinking about it, and Gabriel hisses.  When it’s clear that he’s not going to answer that, Jack clenches his jaw, hackles finally rising despite the promise he’d made to himself to keep his own temper in this meeting regardless of provocation from Gabriel.  “Why do you think I wanted this?  We never could keep away from each other, even when we were practically clawing each other’s faces off every time we talked.”  All too true, even now, apparently.  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about talking to you since the last time.  Probably stupid of me, I know, but for some reason I give a shit.  I want to know…  _ why, _ Gabriel.”

The silence between them has shifted, now tasting of acrid disbelief.  

“Why,  _ what? _ ”  The words are soft, his tone pure danger.  

But Jack plows ahead.  If Gabriel needs him to spell it out, then  _ fine _ , he will.  “We were fighting all the time and you were pissed at Command, and I get that, but even with all that I couldn’t believe you would….”  

He trails off as Gabriel starts laughing.  It’s so low at first that Jack can barely hear it, but Gabriel’s shoulders are shaking, and the laughter rolls on and on, black and cold and more bitter than anything he thinks he’s ever heard.  

“There’s something I didn’t want to believe about you, too.  But that fucking shows me, I guess, doesn’t it?” he mutters, as if to himself, when his laughter finally stops.  

Then, his face rises to pin Jack with that masked gaze, that has somehow gone even more sharp and predatory despite having no actual mobility of expression, and he snarls, “Get the fuck out, Morrison.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long - I had to work out a lot of backstory notes before I could even begin to start writing this conversation. 
> 
> These two might be the most exhausting pair to write I've ever dealt with, but I love them to pieces.


	6. Chapter 6

_ Gabriel had arrived at Headquarters three days ago for a series of command meetings with the Security Council and a small handful of other top Overwatch officers, which has swiftly deteriorated into something midway between an inquisition and a pitched firefight, or so it’s felt to him.  He’d have preferred an actual firefight, all things considered, he thinks in frustration as he and Morrison are arguing through an afternoon recess.   _

_ It’s the same stale shit as it’s been between them for years, salted liberally with the tension of these recent proceedings with the suits.  Gabriel has felt a hairsbreadth away from being arrested and dragged out of the meeting chamber at least a dozen times so far, and has started having to resist the temptation to punch the Overwatch Board Chairperson’s face in just to let them get it over with.  _

_ At least then he’d get  _ some _ kind of satisfaction from this clusterfuck.   _

_ Morrison, meanwhile, is being as stubbornly obtuse as ever, thinking this is just another PR fire he can put out if he kisses enough ass - and if Gabriel does it with him, apparently.  But it’s not about what the elusive “public” thinks about Overwatch right now, not really, not today.  It’s about a snowball Gabriel felt starting to roll downhill a long, long time ago, and politicians sharpening their knives because they know Overwatch is nearing the end of its practical usefulness to them.  Not because of any PR fuck-ups on the part of Overwatch itself, but because the world has finally started pulling itself together enough again that the suits know they won’t be able to get away with with this particular brand of militarized strong-arming much longer.   _

_ But Commander Boyscout Morrison either doesn’t see it, or has bought into it just as deeply as Gabriel has recently been starting to fear.   _

_ “You know what the story’s gonna be, when this all finally goes down in flames, right?” Gabriel spits out, reaching his tolerance limit for dealing with Morrison’s pacification BS.  “You’re the tragic hero; I’m the villain.  The big, angry dark guy who got jealous over a promotion and threw tantrums and fucked everything up.”   _

_ He pauses, lips twisting in a vicious smirk.  “Probably take it all the way to never naming Blackwatch, never admitting what we were, turning us into a bunch of malcontents because it makes for a better scapegoat than a sanctioned black ops unit.  They started setting this up when Overwatch first went public.” _

_ “Reyes,  _ yes _ , the Chair’s a dick, but this whole conspiracy theory thing isn’t going to help us deal with him!  Now please, just - “ _

_ A tone sounds to summon them back into the conference room.   _

_ Two hours later, he and Morrison are snarling at each other through another recess, and then everything does, quite literally, go down in flames.   _

 

...

 

Gabriel has never been able to tell if the way the constant pain that flares up sharply in his body when he’s especially upset is psychosomatic, or some actual, chemical response to stress hormones that’s a side effect of his resurrection, but whichever it is, it feels like glass in his lungs, sand in his eyes, and fire along his skin.  It seems fitting, right now.  He uncovered enough information two years ago to convince himself Jack hadn’t been an active saboteur of Overwatch, so he had - naively, it seems now - not anticipated the man being able to hurt him this much, if he agreed to the meeting.  

Unlikely as it might have seemed to the outside eye when Overwatch fell, Gabriel still had had some faith in Jack to lose.  For all the conflict between them, for all Jack’s willful blindness to the things Gabriel had been dealing with for years, Gabriel had, at the least, not thought  _ Jack _ would buy into the narrative he’d predicted, hours before the explosion.  But now it seems he was more right about how events would be seen than he could have possibly known.   

His laughter is all the anger and cynicism and despair of the last decade condensed and expressed in the best way he knows to cut at Jack in retaliation.  

“There’s something I didn’t want to believe about you, too.  But that fucking shows me, I guess, doesn’t it?” he mutters viciously, though he fully intends for Jack to hear it.  Jack’s face is confused and wary as Gabriel looks back up at him, and the fact that he’s so obviously unaware of why Gabriel is so angry just makes it worse.  

“Get the fuck out, Morrison,” he orders more loudly, more directly, managing to keep his voice in an angry snarl rather than reveal that choked feeling that lies beneath it.  He hopes, anyway.  

“Gabriel - “  Jack rises to his feet, shoulders squared, but of fucking course he’s not just going to leave.  

“ _ Out! _ ” he repeats, almost yelling, now, but he keeps watching Jack, and that is his undoing, as it always was and apparently always will be.  

Jack has a look of horrified realization, and desperation that touches Gabriel down to the soul he doesn’t really believe he has, anymore.  “Gabriel - there’s, there’s shit here that I know I don’t understand, I can’t be seeing right, and - “  

Gabriel is moving to grab a shotgun anyway, for all the good that will do him against his own debilitating weakness toward this one infuriating man.  Gun in one hand, he doesn’t raise it - yet - but instead goes for the ultimately more satisfying grip around Jack’s throat with his free one, slamming the man into the wall and pinning him there.  

“Damn right you don’t understand,” he hisses as Jack’s hands come up to grab his wrist, though they don’t try to break his hold.  “You never did.”

“ _ But I want to _ ,” Jack gasps out.  “I’m - Gabe, I’m sorry.  You - the explosion - it wasn’t you.”  It’s still a question, and it’s still fucking insulting, but at least it starts with the right assumption.  

“No.”  Gabriel’s voice is flat and forceful, bitter now rather than burning.  “It wasn’t.  I’d heard it got unofficially blamed on me, but I thought you of all people would damn well know better.”  

Wide blue eyes, with that guileless look that had charmed half the world, once, stare into the pits of Gabriel’s mask as if Jack can actually see him in there.  “I did,” he whispers, swallowing against the pressure of Gabriel’s hand.  “Know better.  But… so soon before… you were so  _ sure _ in what you were saying, and then I find out you’re alive and working with Talon.  Hunting down old agents of ours, of  _ yours _ , in the ‘watch.”  

Gabriel stares at him for a long moment in strained silence.  He has no doubts as to Jack’s sincerity, but he’s been looking at him too long; he’s suddenly too worn out to fully decide how much it matters, or should matter to him.  It’s a good reason to believe someone betrayed you, probably, except that Jack is the one person who’d - at least, once upon a time - always thought the best of him, even when it seemed like everyone else was thinking the worst.  Since the fall of Overwatch, Gabriel’s been playing the villain that the head fuckwits in charge have painted ( _ were long ago setting up to paint _ ) him as with a twisted sort of enjoyment, but having Jack Morrison straight-up accuse him just now of one of the few things he would never have done was in a whole other league of betrayal.   _ Jack should have known better _ .  

There’s a long list of things Jack should have known better about, though, and Gabriel came to London with the begrudging intent to talk about them.  He might as well finish doing so, since apparently they’ve gotten the biggest one out of the way first.  

He finally releases Jack, laughing again, though this time it’s tired, resigned, almost soft.  “I’m too fucking good at this for my own good.”  A very small peace offering, though no one other than the man in front of him would know it.

Jack doesn’t rub at the reddened marks on his fair neck, despite a very small trickle of blood from where one of the claws on Gabriel’s gauntlet dug in a bit too hard.  Instead he just shakes his head and slumps back down on the nearby pew, looking as tired as Gabriel feels.  “You’ve always been too good at a lot of things for your own good.”  

The slightest hint of real amusement tilts Gabriel’s lips behind the mask when Jack picks up the thread of one of their oldest shared jokes.  It’s as old as their first month in the SEP together, when they passed the first battery of tests and were cleared to continue the enhancement protocol and training.   _ Congratulations, you’re exceptional!  You’ve earned the privilege of us continuing to try to kill you. _

“Damn right.”

Jack looks wary as he voices his next question, but it’s one Gabriel had no illusions of him  _ not _ asking.  “Talon, though.  You didn’t deny working with them.  What’s with that?”  

He shrugs.  “I needed resources and couldn’t trust anyone.  They had resources and no expectations of being trusted.  And they had information I wanted access to.”  Like who they’d had planted in his fucking team.  As it turned out, they had conveniently wanted some of their loose ends tied up, which Gabriel had been more than happy to help with.  

“That easy?”  The look Jack is giving him is incredulous.  

Gabriel crosses gauntleted arms and stares his ex-commander (ex-subordinate, ex-teammate, ex-lover, ex-friend… ex- damn near everything, apparently) down.  “I’d just been blown up and left to die after watching the people whose dirty work I’d been doing for years gearing up to smear the everloving shit out of me and my people.  And then turned into a freak of nature sometime after I’d already managed to die, or come close enough to it to not be in pain anymore.  Ana was dead, Jesse was gone,  _ you _ were dead, as far as I knew - “ and yeah, fine, he isn’t going to pretend that hadn’t been a soul-crushing thought, even though more and more in those days he’d hated Jack more than he’d loved him - “and I figured that if they were going to drag me through the mud and make my mangled corpse into their villain, I might as well play the part.  I was outta shit to lose and fucks to give, Jack, so yeah, I took jobs from Talon.”   _ And that’s all the justifying it I’m going to do, so leave it the fuck alone _ .  

He nods, seeming to accept this, though he’s been frowning since Gabriel mentioned having died.  “How - ?  ...Angela?” he asks, and Gabriel knows what he means.  

“Yeah.  I don’t know anything about the details, but I know she did it.  And I assume I was actually dead, because I have a fucking autopsy scar.”  

“Shit, Gabriel.”

“Wasn’t exactly my favorite thing to wake up to.”  That’s the understatement of his life, and Gabriel Reyes is the uncontested master of sardonic understatements.  He suppresses a shudder, then decides to turn the line of questioning back onto Jack.  “So what about you?  You’ve been bouncing around the world playing Dark Knight to my Bane, but as best I can tell haven’t connected with any of the old guard.  Did you know Winston’s initiated a recall?”  

Eleven days ago, apparently.  His raid on the Gibraltar base where the science monkey had (recently, it seemed) holed up had been… amusing, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about having to all appearances been the catalyst for that recall.  

“I knew, yeah.”  Jack’s expression is guarded.  “I think it’s a bad idea.  The hell are they going to do, waltz back up to the UN and say ‘Hi, we know you dissolved us a few years ago, but it’s obvious you can’t handle your shit and would you like to tell us what to do again instead of arresting us for re-forming?’”  He snorts, shaking his white head wearily.  

“That might be the smartest thing I’ve heard you say in ten years,” Gabriel allows dryly, leaning back into the wall again - even in something akin to repose retaining all the battle-ready attention of a wildcat.  “Did you finally wake up to how they’d been using us, too?”  How they’d exploited Blackwatch.  Sometimes he thinks they even intentionally set him and Jack up to clash with one another, to keep the two of them from presenting a united front to their UN controllers and thereby potentially making Overwatch a power in its own right.  The suits had known about their relationship by the end of the Crisis.  Known, and hadn’t liked it one bit, but obviously hadn’t been willing to sideline their most effective officers over it, which he had to grudgingly give them credit for.  

Jack is glaring at him, hackles up.  Good.  This needs to be aired and if Jack is pissed off, maybe it will all come out.  

“Is  _ that _ what this is about, then?  Seriously?  How you were right about them all that time?  Does it really matter that much, now?”  

Yes, it fucking matters.  

He manages to keep his own temper this time, mostly.  Because no, Gabriel Reyes is not above having ruminated on how to deliver the ‘I told you so’ of the goddamn  _ century _ many, many times prior to this actual meeting.  

“It’s only the root of what felt like half the arguments we had those last few years,” he retorts acidly.  “And the root of why reforming Overwatch is a terrible idea.  If that doesn’t matter, I don’t know what does.”  

Silence stretches, then yawns like a chasm between them.  Or maybe it’s just highlighting the one that was already there, the one that first started opening when they promoted Jack over Gabriel and relegated Gabriel to the increasingly dirty work of black ops.  

Jack finally does break it, though, and in the right way, albeit begrudgingly.  “Then yes.  Fine.  You were right.  Things went rotten after we ended the Crisis, and I had too much faith in the system and the mission to see it, back then.”  

It doesn’t mend things between them.  It doesn’t suddenly make everything okay.  It doesn’t mean that Jack actually understands all the little betrayals that are wrapped up in the whole.  (He probably doesn’t.)  But it is something, and it’s a lot more than Jack had ever been willing to admit back then.  

Gabriel lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this at least somewhat starts to make up for the previous chapter. ;)
> 
> I have Very Strong Opinions about the two-dimensionality of Reyes's portrayal in the game and the official media, as you might be able to tell from this. Not that Blizzard characters are ever all that complex/developed, but the whole "Gabriel Reyes betrayed everything he built and protected and (presumably) just about everything he cared about (and now wants to kill his former BFF) because he was jealous of that BFF's promotion" narrative is, to me, particularly egregious. 
> 
> I mean, to my knowledge, they never came out and said that Reyes Set Us Up the Bomb in Geneva, but it's at least been implied enough that several secondary sources (wiki, TVTropes, etc) have more or less taken it as canon. I've thoroughly enjoyed many other people's interpretations of the story that accept that particular detail, but I wanted to put a bit of a different spin on it in this fic.
> 
> That said, in my head Gabriel's certainly no angel, so I hope I've struck an appropriate balance here.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The two old grouches get some more practice in Using Their Words. (And the author rampantly abuses italics, as is her usual wont.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive! Sort of. The reason for my long hiatus with this fic was desperately scrambling to get my doctoral thesis finished and defended along with everything else that comes with finally finishing a six-and-a-half-year stint in graduate school, and I'd hoped to be back in full force much sooner after, but it turns out I've kinda forgotten how not to be a total wreck of a person somewhere along the line and I'm trying to remember. But I scroll through Overwatch ship-stuff when I can't sleep anyway, so hopefully continuing to push myself to write will be therapeutic. :)

Inscrutable as Gabriel should be, suited and masked as he is, Jack, of all people, knows his body language enough to see him relax that tiny bit and know the shift for what it is.  He sighs, himself, more audibly.  If that’s what Gabriel needed to hear… well, there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?  

_ There’s always been a reason.  He’s got a temper, but it’s never been the kind to go off at random, or just because he’s feeling pissy that day. _

He believes Gabriel’s explanation of the last few years.  He believes him about how Gabriel wasn’t the one who engineered the last attack.  Gabriel is a good liar, but Jack’s certainly watched that enough to know what it looks like, and more importantly, he’s never once seen Gabriel lie to make someone think better of him.  (If anything, his subterfuge has always run in the other direction, Jack realizes.  Convincing people that he’s even more of a hardass than he is.  Convincing them that he’ll do terrible things if they don’t cooperate with him.  Convincing them that he’s actually  _ detached _ .  That he doesn’t get emotionally entangled with half the people around him….  Jack cuts off that train of thought when it brings on a wave of pained regret.)  

If the attack on HQ had been Gabriel’s doing, he would have owned it, baldly.  Defiantly.  And so Jack can’t help but believe him.  There’s something else that needs addressing here, though.  

“I didn’t have enough faith in you, Gabe.  But… you didn’t have it in me, either.  Not for a long time, seemed like.”  An observation, and a question.  He looks up at the mask tiredly, but intently.  

Gabriel drums his wicked metal claws against the top of his opposite arm.  “No, I didn’t.  Because the most important things I had to say were all the things you didn’t want to hear.  You were too damn wrapped up in what the suits expected of you to see what we  _ needed _ from you.”  

His own temper flares, but he shoves it back down.  This is the one thing, he realizes, that he needs Gabriel to understand about  _ his _ position.  

“Maybe I was.”  The words come out in a growl despite his weariness and his intent to be diplomatic.  It seems like he used up all of that on the UN, back in the days they’re now discussing, almost.  “But didn’t we decide that that was my job, when the reorganization happened?  Someone had to do the ass-kissing.  You’d have done it in my shoes.  Not as much, maybe, but don’t pretend you didn’t do any of it when you were the CO.  When we agreed I’d take the promotion, we both knew that was going to be part of it.  Even more than what you’d had to do, because we were going public.”  

“So you didn’t have a choice, is that it?” Gabriel snorts.  “You were just doing what your boy scout ass had to do, no more and no less?”  

That cuts, but not for the reason it’s meant to.  It cuts because Jack’s not the only one of the two of them, apparently, who  _ should have known better _ about the other.  

“I was  _ just doing _ my best, Gabriel,” he replies quietly, his own anger not having quite enough oxygen to truly flare up again.  The other man scoffs, but Jack isn’t going to be cut off here.  “For us, for our people, and for what our actual goals were supposed to be, in a position that wasn’t the same as the one you held when we got started.  And that got more and more bogged down in PR bullshit as time went on.  You know it did.  So, could I have managed it better than I did?  Probably.  But just like I was wrong to assume what I did about you… stop convincing yourself that the problem was me not  _ caring _ enough about what we really stood for to see beyond all the damned posters they put up of me.”  His voice has picked up an edge somewhere over the course of this rebuttal, and his throat feels tight, his eyes suddenly stinging.  

The rasping laughter that comes after a moment of quiet from Gabriel’s grim mask is as harsh in sound as ever, but subtly less so in actual tone, more dry than cutting.  “I suppose it would be stupid of me to ever accuse you of not caring  _ enough _ .”  There’s still censure, there - Jack can almost hear the appended ‘but your priorities need work’ even though Gabriel doesn’t voice it - but it seems like… they may have found some kind of truce, all the same.  

He hopes.   _ We’re a real piece of work, aren’t we, Gabe? _

Quiet reigns again in the undercroft, save for the subtle hum of the generator that’s powering the place, as they watch each other.  Jack finds himself wishing he had his full visor faceplate on, because for all he can read Gabriel’s body language near-flawlessly, he knows his own face is even more involuntarily expressive than that.   _ What now? _

And Gabriel, eventually, asks that very question aloud.  “So here we are, having talked about the clusterfuck of those last years, and not killed each other.”  His voice is still bone-dry, and he claps a few times sardonically to match.  “What now, Sunshine?”

But the way he says those few words, and that he uses  _ that _ nickname…  Jack hangs his head to at least partially hide his expression as the stinging in his eyes returns with a vengeance.  “... I’ve missed you,” he admits in a gravely sigh, once he manages to swallow past the swelling lump in his throat.  

 

* * *

 

Gabriel blinks across the room at Jack’s bowed head, surprised that Jack has just said that so openly, but he probably shouldn’t be.  (It’s  _ Jack _ , king of can’t-spit-it-out, but only right up to an arbitrary-seeming breaking point beyond which he suddenly says whatever he’s thinking in the plainest terms possible.  Apparently they’ve found that point, here and now.)  It is perilously, treacherously easy to take the half-dozen steps to close the distance between them, and he does it without thinking about it nearly long enough.  

It had felt, initially, like he was accepting Jack’s invitation to meet for closure - peace from the nagging awareness of a dangling thread, a story left unfinished.  Or perhaps just morbid curiosity, as that had always been a very real motivation for Gabriel to do a lot of things.  But now… did he want the story to  _ be _ finished, truly?  

The ironic and rather telling truth is that he has never once finished a book, or a show, or a movie he wasn’t enjoying just because he needed to get to the ending.  His time has always been too precious for that.  (And besides, who are bad storytellers to dictate when a story is over for Gabriel Reyes?)  Jack has, though.  Jack is the one who can never let something go until it’s “supposed” to be over, no matter how little he likes the process of getting to that point.  

But what Jack has just said means that this isn’t about closure for him, either, and apparently Gabriel’s legs managed to realize that ahead of his brain, just now.  

There is a whisper of warmth blooming in his chest, and it  _ hurts _ , like the pain of frostbitten limbs being slowly, gently thawed, and that combines with the screeching fear in the back of his mind ( _ they’re both broken, too broken, and if they try to be anything else they’ll just break each other all over again _ ) to keep him from being quite as gentle as he means to be when he grasps Jack’s shoulders in both hands, talons digging in.  Jack winces reflexively as he looks up, but the expression that follows is so desperately hopeful and so  _ completely, utterly Jack Ray-of-Fucking-Sunshine Morrison _ that Gabriel growls and releases him just as abruptly, turning to the side so he doesn’t have to look at Jack’s face when he replies.  

“I’ve missed you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Navigating this pair's emotional conflict is one of the hardest things I've ever done in fic, because the way they both handle it is for the most part utterly alien to me. But it ends up making sense when I finally get it out, at least, or I hope so, anyway. I think with as much history as they've got, there's just no way they're going to resolve their shit in the sort of thorough, itemized way that I'm more used to writing (and doing :P), and it becomes more just a need for them both to acknowledge the shit honestly, followed by both of them being too damn tired of being angry and resentful and hurting for them to want to keep fighting about it.
> 
> Most of the time. I can't really see them ever completely losing the volatility, no matter how used to one another they might eventually become, again.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our antiheroes get chased out of another safe house.

Jack half expects Gabriel to retreat when he rises to his feet and reaches out, but he doesn’t.  He just stands there, an inky shadow in the dim light, as Jack catches hold of  _ his _ synthleather-clad shoulder and tugs at him, urging him to turn around and face Jack once more.  And then there is a tiny shudder that moves through Gabriel’s frame, undetectable if not for the physical point of contact and deep-seated familiarity, and he’s turning voluntarily to catch Jack in a sudden, bone-crackling embrace.  

Jack makes a tiny noise in his throat, halfway between a grunt and a sigh, and buries his face as best he can in… well, the side of Gabriel’s hood, mostly.  Gabe-as-Reaper smells different from how he remembers - the gunpowder is still there (it’ll be there until the day he stops using those shotguns of his, and Jack doesn’t see that happening as long as Gabriel has hands), and the synthleather smell was common enough on him in the old days, but there is something different underlying it all, less like skin and sweat and more like metal and smoke.  But the solid, muscular frame beneath it all, and the way those arms wrap around his shoulders and waist… 

It feels like home.  

_ “Just… c’mere,” Jack sighs, letting his hand fall from the bridge of his nose, which he’d been pinching as if it had any hope of driving away the dull, pounding headache, to look up at Gabriel again and then pull him into a hug.  Gabriel still looks and feels like his hackles are at least halfway up, but he’s as tired and frustrated as Jack is and he doesn’t resist it.  They both need comfort right now, and even if what they most need comforting  _ about _ is each other, this is really the only place they’re going to get it.   _

_ That was less of a problem in the past. _

_ Gabriel grunts softly and picks him up, conveying them both the four steps over to the sofa and sinking down against the armrest so they can curl up more comfortably.  “Something’s gotta give, Jack,” he murmurs, voice rough with as much exhaustion as Jack feels.  “I hate this.  I hate that we’re like this.”   _

_ “Me too,” is all Jack can really say, just now.  He leans up to brush a kiss against Gabriel’s bearded jawline, and Gabriel reciprocates with a kiss pressed into his slightly faded blond hair.  Jack can’t help but smile, at least a little, when Gabe’s lips stay there, and he huffs a breath into Jack’s hair and gathers him closer.   _

_ As bad as things are, it does not occur to either of them that this may not ever happen again, but they will both eventually recall this peaceful, affectionate moment as their last, and they will both cringe away from the memory. _

Jack isn’t sure how long they stand there, like that.  He wants to kiss him, but the bastard’s still got his mask on and Jack is too cautious to reach up and try to tug the obstructive thing off without asking.  So instead, he just murmurs again, quietly, intimately, “I missed you  _ so _ much, Gabe.”  He doesn’t mean just these last few years, either, and he’s sure Gabriel knows that, too.  Their estrangement had fully settled in well before the fall.  

Gabriel doesn’t answer with words this time, but squeezes him more tightly.  

“Why… d’you think we couldn’t do this back then?  Talk about things like this?” Jack asks after another long moment, pulling back enough to search the masked face as if he might be able to find Gabriel’s eyes behind whatever insets keep the mask’s eye sockets so dark, if he just looks hard enough.  

“Hnn.”  Gabriel lets out a quiet snort, and seems to consider the question.  “Too much at stake.  Too many other people’s lives in our hands.  Or that’s my best guess, anyway.  It always was so much bigger than just whether or not  _ we _ got along, back then.  Ironic, isn’t it?”

Jack nods, lips twisting in dark amusement even as his chest feels so much lighter, just to be able to share a sentiment like that with Gabriel again.  “No shit.”  If they had kept ‘getting along,’ so many things might have gone differently.  As a team, they’d saved the world together, once.  As near-adversaries, though… 

Jack doesn’t have time to finish the thought, because there is a very faint noise from the doorway (Jack would have just taken it for a shift in the generator’s cycle, or something, himself), and Gabriel stiffens, then snarls over his shoulder, hands falling away from Jack.  “Sombra,  _ what _ the  _ fuck. _ ”  

A low, feminine laugh answers him a second before the air of the space where he’s looking shimmers and reveals a young woman in bright, head-to-toe (literally, even her hair - the half that isn’t shaved - is dyed to match) violet, who is grinning at the two of them like the proverbial cat who ate the canary.  Jack crosses his arms and stares her down - Gabriel is clearly annoyed but hasn’t bothered to pick up his guns or make any other move to attack, so any threat she poses must be low, but Jack most definitely shares Gabriel’s irritation with her, at the least.  

‘Sombra,’ for her part, is utterly unintimidated, hopping down the last step with spry grace and leaning against the wall as she continues to watch them.  “You really need to install better locks on your doors, Gabe,” she suggests casually, grin slipping into a smirk.  “ _ Especially  _ if you’re going to be bringing home a boyfriend with a price on his head after you’ve killed Talon agents who tried to collect.  Not that it will keep me out, but that thing?  That was just embarrassingly easy.”  

Now Jack’s hackles are up, because that really sounded like a threat to him, but Gabriel just growls at her, “Why are you here?”  

“Because I am an  _ excellent _ friend who thought it would be a shame if the goons from cell theta-phi-three-six-zero caught my favorite cranky  _ viejo _ with his pants down today, so to speak.”  The smirk deepens, and she shrugs and adds, “Or not so ‘so to speak.’  Either way, it would be messy, I think.”

Jack is flabbergasted, and does not trust this brightly-colored little minx in the slightest.  “How the blazes - “

“I’ll explain later,” Gabriel mutters, long-suffering, and while that doesn’t answer the question, his tone at least definitively establishes the woman’s relationship to him, which brings out a tiny huff of amusement from Jack.  That was exactly what he used to sound like when talking about some his younger, more high-spirited agents back in the ‘watch.  “You could have paged me,” he says to her.  

Sombra winks.  “Less secure, and  _ much  _ less fun.  And I was in the area.  Your best option for nearby is a hypertrain to Glasgow, by the way.  A little bird told me that three-six-zero’s Number One doesn’t speak to three-eight-four’s.”  

“How much time?”  

“A couple of hours, maybe, if they don’t get lucky.  If they do…”  She shrugs once more, flicking bright purple fingers idly.  “Again, messy.”  

“Alright.”  Gabriel glances to Jack.  “MRE now or real food on the train?” he asks, drawing a chuckle from the other former soldier.  

“Both?”  Jack hasn’t eaten in  _ ages _ .  

He snorts, nodding and moving to grab a shoulder bag from a shelf before tossing Jack a foil-wrapped package and heading for the door, where Sombra is watching him expectantly.  

“...Thanks,” he says in a gravely sigh, and she visibly preens.  

“You owe me one,  _ viejo _ .”  

“Sure do.  Now scram, before someone tracks your neon ass here, too.”  

She gives Gabriel a mocking salute, winks at Jack, and abruptly disappears, leaving Jack blinking at the spot, looking for that telltale shimmer, but seeing nothing.  

“She used camo to get in, teleported out,” Gabriel explains, reading his mind.  Jack can hear the smirk in his voice.  

Following Gabriel up the little set of stairs and out into the bombed-out church, Jack tears into his MRE and starts devouring it as they walk.  It’s one of the ones that doesn’t even try to have flavor, barely fancier than a particularly dense nutrition bar, but that also means it’s convenient to eat on the go, so it works for him.  

“You trust her not to be setting you up, or should we be on guard for that as well as the goons she mentioned?” he asks around a dry, tasteless mouthful a few moments later.  

“She doesn’t have anything to gain from screwing me over, and plenty to lose,” Gabriel replies confidently as they pick their way through the ruins, Jack to his left and a half-pace behind.  “So yeah, I trust her… well, as much as anyone, these days, honestly.  And more than damn near all of them.”  There is the slightest note of bemusement in this last statement, and it sends a pang through Jack, though he brushes it aside in favor of a short laugh.

“Not a harmless troll, then.”  

Gabriel snorts.  “Definitely a troll.  But definitely not even a little bit harmless, no.”  

Jack smirks and nods.  “Reminded me a little bit of Jesse,” he sighs, then briefly regrets stating the comparison aloud as he realizes that the gunslinger had been - and might still be - a sensitive topic to Gabriel.  

But Gabriel doesn’t seem upset, just grunting out an acknowledgment, then adding dryly, “‘A little bit’ is right.  She’s got his level of respect for her elders, anyway, even if they don’t have much else in common.”  

That makes Jack chuckle, and he reaches out without thinking to clasp his shoulder companionably.  If he had thought, he might have perhaps  _ wondered _ if it was a good idea, but he certainly wouldn’t have anticipated Gabriel’s violent flinch away from the touch, or the hissed exhale that comes with it.  

“Sorry, I - “ he says hastily in surprise and hurt, staring into the black pits of the mask that is now turned back to fix that unreadable stare back upon him.  

Gabriel is silent except for harsh breathing, but Jack can see the the sudden, brittle rigidity of his stance - not aggressive in the way it was during their fraught conversation earlier, but almost… skittish.  Which is a word he has not ever previously associated with Gabriel Reyes.  

“I’m sorry, Gabe - what…?” he tries again.  

Another few seconds of staring, and then Gabriel visibly forces himself to partially relax and start moving again.  “Startled me,” he says flatly.  “We need to get to the train.”

They continue in tense silence, save for the occasional scrape or crunch of their boots on the pavement and debris.  

_...Shit. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could not possibly resist bringing the cyberpunk troll princess into this. I love Sombra so much, you guys, and the idea of her dynamic with Gabriel gives me almost as many giggles as it does feels.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Involuntary reminiscence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: mild (non-explicit) body horror.

_ The first sense Gabriel regains, unfortunately for him, is touch.   _

_ Touch, and with that, a pain that is deep and twisted and  _ wrong.   _ The world is a dark, silent sea of it, occasionally punctuated by the touch of gloved hands, or the prick of a needle.  He cannot hear or see, and so the only warning he ever has, when there is any warning at all, is the faint displacement of air by his skin immediately before the actual contact.   _

_ Sometimes the touches bring relief, and sometimes… they emphatically do not.  The gentle times are not enough to keep him from feverishly dreading them, from silently screaming inside whenever the hands return.  He does not know who he is, or why he is here. _

Gabriel stalks through the crumbling remnants of the city district and tries to keep himself from shaking hard enough for Jack to notice.  

_ The second sense to return is smell.  He has never been especially bothered by the smell of medical disinfectant - he’d have had a much harder time getting through the SEP if he was (where had that thought come from?) - but now, it’s everywhere, all the time, and it’s utterly nauseating.   _

_ Sound comes more slowly.  Sometimes all he hears is more a lack of silence than things he can identify as discrete noises.  There is a pervasive, high-pitched, electronic whine that would set his teeth on edge, if he could move his jaw.  Sometimes he can tell someone is talking, quietly, but not what they are saying.   _

_ Sometimes a word or two emerges, crystal clear, in a language he should know.  “Warum bist…?”   _

_ German.  The voice speaks German, and is talking to itself.   _

_ The invasive touches become slightly more predictable as his hearing stabilizes, but no less upsetting.  He still cannot move or speak, and he doesn’t know whether his eyes are open or closed.   _

“...Gabriel?”  

Jack’s rough voice snaps him out of the past for a moment, and he almost stumbles with the force of his gratitude, however brief that gratitude is.  He looks over his shoulder warily.  “Yeah?”  

“You normally wear the mask on the hypertrain?”  Jack is smirking, just a little.  

Gabriel snorts to hide how off-balance that question puts him.  He’d thought of that earlier, that he’d have to take it off at some point, but ‘earlier’ seems much longer ago than it really was, at present.  He’s not ready to take it off, not nearly.  But he keeps his voice nonchalant as he replies.  “Nah.  Hang on a second.  Guess I have to end the mystery eventually.”  

“Guess so,” Jack agrees, lips stretching up a little more.  

Fine.  

Trying not to give himself time to think about it any further, Gabriel lifts clawed fingers in a practiced, delicate motion to flick open the clasps that hold his mask in place, pulling it off before following suit with his coat, gloves, and tac harness, rolling all that together into a neat package that goes into his bag before they cross back over into a habitable zone.  The coat is replaced by a faded black hoodie with a Blind Guardian logo, its hood pulled quickly back over his head.  

He knows Jack is watching him, can practically feel that hungry, blue gaze sweeping over his revealed features, but he keeps his own averted as he changes, for as long as he can.  It could definitely be worse, all things considered, but he knows he looks… odd.  

His skin, once a warm, rich brown, has been almost entirely leached of color, leaving it ashen grey.  His hair and beard have changed less, or less unnaturally, anyway, but only because steel and charcoal and the sparse salting of white are likely what he would have by now, resurrection or no.  Meanwhile, it’s as if all the melanin that fled his skin and hair has moved to his eyes, whose irises are now almost as black as the pupils, rather than the brandy color they once held.  

His eyes have always been a weapon, at least; now they are only more so, when he chooses to let someone see them.  With that thought, Gabriel raises them to Jack’s at last, direct and challenging when their gazes finally meet.  

Jack doesn’t blink the way he would have when they were young together.  Doesn’t back down, but his square acceptance of the tacit challenge is different from how it would have been the final years of Overwatch, as well - warmer, not antagonistic.  

After a long moment, he tilts his head and speaks, tone wry, though Gabriel can hear the edge of an emotion Jack’s trying to hide.  “Well, you’ve got your edgelord theme going stronger than ever, that’s for damn sure.  Should have known you could come back from the dead and still be unfairly pretty, I guess.”  

“I’m going to go ahead and guess that more or less fixing whatever bits probably got blown off my face was a lot easier than the rest of bringing me back,” Gabriel husks in return, then internally curses himself for the reference as it threatens to bring on another wave of memory.  “What are we waiting for?”  

He doesn’t wait for an answer to the gruff question, but shoulders his bag again and strides toward the city lights.  

* * *

 

It doesn’t take Jack very long to stop feeling perplexed and faintly hurt over the sudden, tense silence from Gabriel - certainly not as long as he once would have.  He can recognize a scar when he sees it, even if he can’t tell what, exactly, the scar is from.  

It is jarring, all the same: Gabriel was always the more physical of the two of them, in the past, openly affectionate and prone to seeking comfort through touch above all else.  Jack, meanwhile, had been stiff and jumpy - while he’d always had charisma, little things like companionable claps on the back he had had to explicitly teach himself to do.  For Gabriel to recoil now… it makes Jack’s heart hurt, perhaps even more so in context of the brief embrace before Gabriel’s impish protégé had interrupted them.  This is a scar he was not there to see heal over.  

He holds off on the question until he’s genuinely concerned about being conspicuous, and he is grateful when Gabriel rouses easily from whatever reverie he’s been walking in to get out of that mask and coat.  The UK Trans-Isle has almost certainly seen stranger things than Reaper in full gear, but Jack has learned in the past few years that it’s better to keep as low a profile as possible, whenever possible.  Gabriel’s newly-revealed physical state is disturbing, but not in the way that he seems to anticipate it being.  

_ And I assume I was actually dead, because I have a fucking autopsy scar. _

He had sounded angry, resentful when he said that.  Fair enough; Jack can’t even begin to imagine how distressing the whole thing had actually been.  But in the quiet of his mind, Jack Morrison also gave thanks that their pacifist medical prodigy-turned-reluctant-combat-medic did… whatever it was she did… to bring Gabriel back.  

_ Gabe’s back.  Gabriel Reyes is still alive, and still himself _ .  

He has been so focused on the present over the last few hours that he almost cries as that sinks in again.  

“What are we waiting for?” Gabriel asks.  

Equilibrium.  Peace.  Jack doesn’t know.  He follows Gabriel into the living part of the city.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The slightly awkward train ride to Glasgow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hug Gabriel Reyes 2k17.

Jack’s stomach is growling again by the time they’re on the train, as if he didn’t just eat a supersoldier-grade MRE on the way, and at earliest opportunity, he snags two enormous sandwiches (made with the soy-lentil loaf slices that are the most popular meat substitute in Britain - meat isn’t rationed like it was in the Crisis, sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still absurdly expensive) from the food kiosk and brings them back to their pair of seats.  Gabriel is waiting in one of them, face turned toward the window and barely visible beyond his raised hood, body set in a strange posture that somehow straddles the rather wide gulf between ‘lounge’ and ‘perch’ that is uniquely his.  He notices Jack’s presence, though, and turns toward him as he sits down and offers Gabriel a sandwich and a bottle of sports drink.  

They eat in a silence that half-remembers how to be companionable, despite being laced with the inevitable tension of so  _ much _ that’s happened between them since the last time they did anything even remotely like this.  So much that Jack suddenly feels nervous about it in a way he definitely didn’t prior to this point, and can’t quite put a finger on.  

“How were you not absolutely starving by now?” he blurts eventually, noticing that Gabriel’s sandwich is only partially eaten, and he hasn’t touched it in minutes.  Ever since the SEP finished with them, they’ve practically had to carry ration bars around at all times to stay in top form, but this is the first time Jack’s seen Gabriel eat since the rescue.

Gabriel gives him a slow smirk, the kind that means he’s about to say something ridiculous that has about a 50/50 chance of being true or wildly false.  “Metabolism’s a bit different since I woke up, Jackie.  Turns out human souls are just as tasty as I’d always thought they’d be.”  

Jack blinks flatly at him for a moment before snorting and shaking his head, trying not to laugh.  “Christ, you fucking edgelord.  I know life’s probably been at least as shitty to you as it has to me the last few years, but if you try to tell me some part of you’s not enjoying the whole ‘avatar of death in a black cloak and a skull mask’ shtick, I’m gonna call bullshit.”  

“It’s a  _ barn owl _ mask,  _ pendejo _ ,” Gabriel retorts, rolling his eyes.  

“So, fine; I listened to your aunt’s stories, a cultural reference that’s associated with death and also happens to look like a skull.  As if that makes you any  _ less _ of an edgelord.”  Jack’s laughing now, he can’t help it.  It feels good.  “You got a buzzard mask kicking around somewhere, too, for when you wanna switch things up a bit?  Oh, or wait, that’s not goth enough, maybe a raven…”  

Gabriel’s lips press together and he huffs a snort through his nose and answers Jack’s original question.  “Seriously, though, metabolism’s changed.  I don’t know the specifics because whatever Angela did to me didn’t come with a manual, but if I had to guess it’s got something to do with the nanotech.”  

It makes sense.  But that’s not what Jack’s interested in.  He full-on grins at Gabriel.  “You changed the subject!  You really do have a raven costume somewhere, don’t you?”  

He mutters something under his breath that sounds like “shut up,” then, “This from the guy whose primary aesthetic feature is a fucking gas station logo.”  

“One, it’s an American institution.  Two, it was on sale and I like the colors,” Jack sniffs.  “Plus, we don’t all have god-tier tailoring skills.”  

“I offered to teach you.”  

“Yeah, and I was too busy finishing my assistant medic certification, and then you were too busy with the Deadlock job, and then me with St. Petersburg, and… yeah.”  He’s sobered now, with those remembrances.  And mentioning Deadlock makes a question form on his tongue, but before he can ask it, Gabriel answers.  

“Sombra checked up on Jesse for me a few times.”  

“He doing okay?”  

Gabriel snorts softly, jaw tightening.  That’s a ‘yes, but not really,’ then, which Gabriel confirms verbally a moment later.  “He’s alive, and operating alone.  Has more bounties on his ass than you’ve got on yours.”  

Which means he’s playing lonely vigilante, too.  Fitting, Jack supposes, but Gabriel doesn’t seem especially happy about it, and while he can probably guess why, he realizes that they never talked about it when McCree left Blackwatch, not really.   _ Shouted _ about it, sure, but that’s different, and Jack feels an acute twinge of shame to realize that he hadn’t asked, then.   _ Should have _ asked, even though things had been bad enough between them by then that they were barely speaking.  He’d still cared about Gabriel’s feelings, but truly hadn’t been acting like it.  

“You hoped he might… settle down?” he asks, quietly.  

Gabriel’s lips twist upward into a rueful smirk, but it’s several seconds before he answers.  “ _ Settle down _ , no, not that kid.  But he wasn’t made to be alone, either.  I’d thought he might follow Genji.”  

“Shimada?”  Jack blinks in surprise.  “Think they had something going?”  

“I don’t think either of them knew it yet, but they  _ definitely _ had something going.”  

Jack isn’t going to question that.  Gabriel always was almost supernaturally good at figuring out who was sleeping with whom, or wanted to be, even when they were trying to hide it.  

“Carrying on the tradition and didn’t even know it,” Jack chuckles instead, wryly.  It was the kind of thing that Gabriel would have been technically supposed to discourage, but as the fraternization regs had been blown to smithereens out of the gate by the two of them (whether any given member of the ‘watch knew it or not, though most had), neither had ever been particularly inclined to enforce them on others.  

“Yeah, well.  They might have, but they both knew shit was going to hell, and they reacted.”  Gabriel’s eyes are distant, melancholy, and Jack feels bad for the mild joke.  

_ And others barely reacted at all. _  Gabriel didn’t say it, but Jack’s saying it enough for the both of them.  He had been so wrapped up in maintenance mode, in the idea that it was even remotely possible to keep all his juggling balls in the air, circulating as they had before, that he’d been unwilling to listen to someone telling him the balls themselves were falling apart.  

There is a long silence while Jack ponders this, longer than it probably should be, during which Gabriel looks away, face turned back to the window as he watches the misty landscape go by in a blur.  

“I’m sorry,” Jack says softly, finally, long after the appropriate window for a response, he thinks, but Gabriel turns his face toward him and just tilts his head in the barest of nods.  No refutation, no reassurances.  But that silent acceptance is somehow a hundred times more poignant than the aftermath of so many other apologies, years before, for its lack of qualifiers.  Jack’s chest feels heavy and light at the same time.  

 

* * *

 

 

The rest of the ride to Glasgow is spent in near silence, though eventually Gabriel offers Jack the uneaten remainder of his sandwich and it is accepted with a grunted “thanks” that somehow raises an unbidden wave of sentiment.  

_ The other partnered teams in the SEP get close to each other, but Gabriel and Jack are always the odd ones.  Other pairs eat together; they bring one another food unasked and casually commandeer leftovers from each other’s plates without asking.  Other pairs play on the same pool team; they play on different ones and somehow the entire game, no matter how many other people are involved, becomes about  _ their _ laughing rivalry.  Other pairs work well together in combat exercises; they are certainly competent apart, but their training officers start giving the other team another two members when Gabriel and Jack are working together, because otherwise there’s just no reasonable degree of competition.   _

_ They breathe each other’s air and share each other’s thoughts and their every moment together is a dance of thought and instinct and action.   _

They had hardly ever been physically together on a battlefield in the last several years of Overwatch, and Gabriel finds himself idly wondering if perhaps  _ that _ , more than anything else, might have been the culprit for the loss of rapport between them.  It is uniquely difficult to resent or hate someone you constantly feel like another limb in the adrenaline-soaked field of combat, and a not-insignificant number of their fights in the earlier days were ended by a shared mission and the accompanying sense of connection.  

Not much else has ever seemed to matter, in the face of that.  Gabriel tries not to think about how much he misses it.  (What did it say about them, that they perhaps needed to shoot at things together regularly to get along?  What would they have done in the peaceful retirement they’d once both optimistically envisioned?  He doesn’t know.)  

_ They are both sweating heavily; bruises have formed and are fading almost as quickly.  Gabriel is bleeding very lightly from a graze over his eyebrow.  And they both smell irredeemably like the bright green paint that spatters across their skin and clothes in several places thanks to glancing hits from the enemy team during a field exercise.   _

_ “So,” Gabriel says, flashing his partner a challenging grin.  “Still pissed?  We can take this to the sparring mat if we need to.  Or we could hit the showers and call it a night.”   _

_ They had argued earlier about the (useless, clueless, arrogant) Assistant Program Director and the degree to which Jack was or was not (was) kissing up to him, both still fuming as they had started the tactical exercise.  But almost as soon as they’d started the mock-skirmish - which their team had handily won - their aggression had refocused outward, and they were moving in seamless harmony once again, and Gabriel’s blood is still singing with the joy of that connection.  _

_ That trust.   _

_ He is so utterly, completely in love with this brash idiot whitebread farm boy, it’s a little ridiculous.   _

_ “Showers,” Jack says, like Gabriel knew he would.  The look in his eyes is wry, but hasn’t quite lost the caution that is always so absent from his presence on the field and yet so far completely characterizes his words and actions in quieter times.  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”   _

_ Gabriel’s grin turns wicked.  “Oh,  _ I _ know.  I think it’s you who could use some reminding of that, Sunshine.”   _

_ Jack has to have known he’d go there, but adorable and still-mildly-repressed creature that he is, he blushes profusely, which only makes Gabriel smile more.   _

And then, suddenly, they are debarking in Glasgow, and Jack is looking lost.  “I, uh, don’t really have a set-up here, and maybe I should have thought of this earlier, but is it really the best idea for me to be following you around?   I could - “  

And yeah, he could, Gabriel supposes as he shakes himself out of the haze of almost painfully happy memories.  No matter how much things thawed between them hours earlier, it would be all too easy for him to stay aloof here and now, and have Jack on a flight somewhere, anywhere else within a few more hours.  That would be smart, wouldn’t it?  They’ve talked.  They’ve said things that have needed saying for years.  It’s been a better meeting than Gabriel could have previously imagined, so it’d be best not to let it go long enough to be ruined, probably.  Not to mention, the far less pleasant flashbacks are still looming in his internal peripheral vision, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they force their way to the front again.  

But Gabriel is here because he wanted to be before, and he finds that somewhat to his surprise (and perilous, deadly hope), he still wants to be, now.  He cuts off Jack’s verbal indecision swiftly, easily, as if it doesn’t terrify him to do so.  “You could leave, sure,  _ or _ , you could come find a hotel with me and help me pick what old movies to watch tonight while we order room service, since, you know, you’re here already.”  Jack made the first overture for this little reunion.  Gabriel isn’t too fucking chicken to make the second one.  

The way his old and rather retrofitted heart speeds up at Jack’s slow, tentative smile means this is probably not at  _ all _ a wise suggestion, but he’s made it and he’s sticking to it.  And focusing on not showing how infernally relieved he is when Jack gives a little nod and says, “Alright.  Since I’m already here.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a bad few weeks for writing. I got a whole other fic idea based on some of the mental health shenanigans that made it hard to write! But. Actually writing that fic is for later. Thanks for your patience and I hope it's not blatantly obvious that I wrote this chapter in about a dozen individual sittings/attempts.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel is likely to be eaten by a grue.

The hotel they end up in is an elegant affair with a stately commitment to its Baronial aesthetic (a categorization Gabriel recalls with private amusement from one of his college courses, which seems like not one, but more like two or three lifetimes behind him), whose prices are lower than they might otherwise be because the place also eschews the many conveniences conveyed by modern interconnected appliances - the rooms don’t even have wifi.  Which suits both of them just fine, all things considered.  They both know more than most about the security vulnerabilities such things typically allow, and Gabriel knows more than damn near anyone except an IT (in)security professional thanks to Blackwatch and his more recent association with Sombra.  

In other words, it’s a good fit for them, so much so that it is exactly the sort of place they would have chosen for one of their rare romantic getaways a decade and a half ago.  And when Gabriel realizes  _ that _ , he’s a little less comfortable.  

Is that what they’re doing, now?  Not for the first time, it seems far, far too easy, and that presents a peril beyond the almost comparatively simple one of Gabriel potentially trusting Jack more than the man deserves right now.  

_ The fight is effectively over when Jack gives him that  _ look _ , and Gabriel caves and kisses him.  But unlike all the times they’ve done things the exact same way in the past, this time the kiss brings more bitterness than relief to Gabriel: he knows how the next several steps go.   _

_ The kiss deepens because of course it does; how can it do anything else when they love each other this much and they barely get time to themselves (and each other) any more?  Gabriel can already feel his body waking up, that heated hunger flaring in his gut that spurs him to press Jack backward and against the wall, to suddenly pin his wrists beside his head and slip a knee between his thighs for him to grind against.  And now Jack is moaning and melting beneath him and he can already feel his resentment fraying in the face of that shared need.   _

_ Except it doesn’t fray quite enough to fall apart and disappear entirely, this time.   _

_ They will make frantic love to one another for several hours (such stamina being one of the few unalloyed gifts of the SEP), and then fall asleep in a sweaty tangle of limbs and thoughts and feelings.  And then they will wake up and go about business as usual, with their most recent argument seeming unimportant in the soft light of morning and post-coital glow.   _

_ But Gabriel has never gotten as angry as he just recently was over something truly unimportant, and the factors involved affect far more than just the two of them.  Fucking out your problems works just fine when the ‘problems’ are petty ones to begin with, but not so much for the two of them.  Not in a long, long time.   _

_ It’s so damn easy to try, though. _

Their relationship has a number of familiar, comfortable, well-trodden paths to move along, but that hurt them as much as it helped them, in the past.  But here they are now, anyway, so Gabriel focuses on the logistics.  

“All we have is rooms with a king-size.”

Fine, well enough - that takes the awkward question out of it.  They can put a masking tape line down the center (or more likely, Gabriel can just leave) if things don’t end up comfortable enough for them to share it.  

“That’s fine.”

Jack looks relieved when Gabriel says this, and Gabriel has to look away from him because if he thinks too hard about what, exactly, Jack is thinking right now, he is going to turn around and flee the hotel before they even make it upstairs.  Instead of risking that, he mentally catalogues the room around them while the front desk attendant fusses with her terminal: warm, flickering light from a cheery fireplace that dances across dark, polished wood surfaces; fussy-looking couch near the fireplace, with a side table that holds a datajack as well as a rack of paper fliers that presumably have tourist information; elevators just down a hall to the left, and a sign indicating a laundry room and other guest services to the right.  

_ You are in the LOBBY.  Exits are EAST, WEST, and SOUTH.  There is a SOFA by the FIREPLACE.  An ATTENDANT stands behind the DESK.   _

Goddamn, he feels old, even as he kind of wants to laugh at himself.  The type of media his internal monologue belongs to was already pretty old even when he was a kid.  

He wonders whether the exits really are east, west and south.  Probably not.  

_ The ATTENDANT hands you a KEY, which you put in your POCK- _

No, he’s just holding it, and now he’s thanking her and heading for the elevator with Jack at his shoulder.  

“Wonder how old this place actually is,” Jack murmurs as they step into the elevator.  “Seems like somewhere we’d have gone, once upon a time, if it had been open.”  

Gabriel has, of course, been thinking the same thing, but Jack saying as much…  No, this is ridiculous; he was talking history with his former partner just fucking fine earlier.  He does  _ not _ need to be this jumpy.  

“Not very,” he replies with a bit of a snort, shrugging deeper into his hoodie as the elevator rises to the sixth floor.  

“Yeah?”  

“Sign said ‘Established 2061’ on the way in.”  

“Oh.”  Jack lets out a soft chuckle, and Gabriel manages to smile at that, too.  It’s a long-standing point of humor between them that he always notices that sort of thing, and Jack almost never does.  “Well, they did a good job with the aesthetic.”  

It’s almost a relief how funny he finds  _ that _ statement.  

“So you really can teach an old dog new tricks,” he mutters, biting his lip against a potential sudden outburst of hilarity as the elevator chimes and opens out onto the sixth floor.  

“The hell d’you mean by that?”  Jack is shooting him a tolerantly confused, sidelong look.  

“You said something about  _ aesthetic _ .  I’m so proud of you, boyscout.”  

Jack snorts and bumps a shoulder into his, and that feels… good.  Easy, but not in the wrong way.  “Still an asshole.”  

“Takes one to know one.  Asshole.”  

“And still a fuckin’ twelve-year-old, no matter how much grey you’ve got goin’ on..”  

Gabriel manages a grin.  “You love it.”  

“Yeah, well,” is all he says in response, wryly, and Gabriel feels a little warmer.  

 

* * *

 

Jack isn’t sure what to make of Gabriel’s demeanor on the way to the hotel, or as they’re checking in, but the lack of readability bears more resemblance to their early friendship than it does their years of estrangement, and that’s worth something, he supposes.  It does leave him feeling more than a little wrong-footed and nervous, though - there’s the bright, tenuous hope that this could actually turn out well for the two of them, that they might actually succeed in a  _ mending _ rather than merely a  _ truce _ , counterbalanced by the simultaneous, strong sense that everything could just as easily go to hell all of a sudden and leave them back where they started, only without this recent hope of reconciliation.  Jack’s younger self might very well have assumed everything would work out after they successfully addressed the most volatile issue back at the safehouse; older-and-wiser Jack damn well knows better.  

Gabriel hadn’t verbally had a problem with the king-size bed, but the subtle shift after that came up, specifically, has Jack wondering.  But when they finally get to the room - small but tastefully appointed and clean-smelling - Gabriel is acting normal, per twenty years ago’s standards, and Jack continues not to know what to make of that.  

“I, um, really need a shower sooner rather than later,” he observes, shrugging his shoulders against the grimy feeling of a fistfight followed by nearly a day’s captivity and their subsequent two-segment journey to Glasgow.  

Gabriel just nods.  “Go for it; I’ll figure out food and put in an order.”  

“Alright.”  He smiles, trying and mostly failing to catch Gabriel’s eyes.  “Thanks.”  And he retreats to the bathroom, feeling wrongfooted all over again.  

Lack of other modern amenities aside, he is grateful to find a credchit-accepting toiletry dispenser in the bathroom, from which he collects a toothbrush and paste to supplement the basic soap and shampoo that still comes standard in almost all hotel rooms.  He turns the water onto the hottest setting without even bothering to check what the temperature range is like, and gets into the shower as soon as he starts to smell the steam that says it has heated up.  

A breath hisses out through his lips as the water hits him - it’s hot,  _ way too hot _ , really, but he likes it that way.  It’s not going to actually burn him in any meaningful sense; even if his nerves  are correct in their assessment, the SEP-induced healing factor will handle any true overload.  And the all-consuming sensation of  _ too much _ that turns his weathered but still fair skin bright pink takes him out of his head for a brief, but altogether needed respite.  For just a few minutes, he can pretend that this is the past and things are still okay, and then for a few minutes more, he can convince himself that things can be okay  _ again _ .  

He hears the door to the bathroom open sometime during his shower reverie, but doesn’t think much of it - Gabriel is washing his hands or taking a piss and either way it’s nothing outside what’s expected between the two of them.  But when he finally gets out some time later, already preemptively cringing a bit at the idea of having to put back on his previously-worn clothes (if only to go downstairs to the gift shop and buy a tee shirt and shorts, or something), he finds a tightly-rolled shirt and sweats sitting on the toilet lid.  They smell of Gabriel when he puts them on (drawstring cinched as tight as it will go around his waist, as Gabriel’s always had hips and he never has) is present even through the freshly-laundered scent that dominates, and he shivers slightly as he tugs the soft garments on.  

His movements hasten, all at once: suddenly he  _ has _ to be out there, has to remember that he’s not just thinking of the scent to comfort himself, that Gabriel is  _ really there _ and really was thoughtful enough to leave clean clothes for him while he showered.  His heart feels as though it stops when he opens the door in a gust of shower steam and doesn’t see the other man, but it starts again just as readily (if a bit painfully) when he realizes Gabriel is perched on the chair at the desk that is sharply around the corner from the primary wall in the hotel room, rather than lounging on the bed.  

“Hey,” he breathes after a moment, trying not to sound as jittery as he feels.  “Thanks for the clothes.”  

“You’re welcome.”  Gabriel is still half in tac gear, himself, despite being minimally civilian-passing, and pushes up to his feet with the predator’s grace that has always marked every movement of his, to Jack’s eyes.  “Dinner’s coming.  Relax, why don’t you.”  

And Jack almost laughs, because for once he recognizes the admonition as one more aimed at Gabriel’s own self rather than at him, but instead he just says, “I’m trying.  You, too, huh?” and steps a bit closer.  

“Yeah,” Gabriel rumbles, eyeing him.  “And I need a shower, myself.  Going to go do that; dinner’ll probably come up while I’m in there.”  

It strikes him that Gabriel has almost always been the one to take care of things like this, and he finds himself strongly resolving to remember that, and do it more.  Optimistically assuming that he gets the opportunity, of course.  

“Okay,” he murmurs, then reaches out to trail still-pinkened fingertips up the muscled line of Gabriel’s arm to his shoulder.  Which thankfully doesn’t make him flinch, unlike earlier.  “Can I…?”  

“Yeah,” comes the affirmation again, more quietly, and they are both already moving closer, Gabriel’s arm wrapping tightly around his waist as he cups that strong, whiskered jaw in both hands and kisses him - gently at first, and then for all he’s worth. 

In this moment, they are safe, and this is all that there is.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOD THEY FINALLY KISSED. I swear I didn't set out to string things out this long, but I'm reasonably pleased with the result, I suppose. xD
> 
> Gabe is an enormous nerd who has played ridiculously ancient classic videogames and no one can convince me otherwise. (For those unfamiliar with the reference, the goofy bits of internal monologue are a throwback to Zork and other parser-based interactive fiction, which is still a thing today!)
> 
> Getting close to the end of this fic, finally! I will, however, be writing more in the same continuity afterward - I am currently planning another fic that focuses on these two assholes after the present arc is finished, a Pharmercy fic, and a McGenji one, with hopefully more than that entering the pipeline if I can get a solid rhythm going again. I may or may not have an over-ambitious macroscale plot worked out at this point. Whoops.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our antiheroes navigate choosing a movie, and other things.

When the kiss breaks, Gabriel heads into the bathroom, feeling half-dazed and almost burned; he isn’t used to skin-on-skin contact anymore, at all, and in a reversal of their previous polarity, Jack is now the one who feels like a living furnace by comparison.  It’s an odd detail, but Gabriel decides that he likes it, lips twisting into a private smile as he starts the shower.  

What he likes much less is the very literal scalding he receives when he gets into the shower without testing the water first.  He manages to keep his outburst to a hissed “ _ shit! _ ” rather than a yelp, but apparently it’s loud enough anyway, because he can faintly hear Jack’s chuckle from the main room in response.  “Trying to boil me, Jackie?” he calls out grouchily as he gingerly adjusts the temperature and tests it.    

“Not really, just myself.  Sorry for the collateral,” comes the reply, and Gabriel snorts as he eases back into the now much more comfortable stream of water.  Years ago, it was always Jack who had complained about the water being too hot when they showered together, and Gabriel wonders if they will be able to find a new compromise point for such things.  

And then he presses his forehead into the cool shower wall behind the spray, letting the water beat down upon the nape of his neck and run along his back as though it might somehow carry the fresh wave of doubt and anxiety that thought inspires away with it.  Gabriel  _ wants _ this.  He wants to be with Jack again, wants to stop fighting how much he loves the idiot and maybe, just  _ maybe _ find some shred of peace in a world that hasn’t held any of it for him in a very, very long time.  But knowing just how much he wants this makes it all the harder to trust that it’s really possible.  Loving Jack is hard, precisely because it’s so easy.  After so many years of increasing dysfunctionality, followed by loss and then disbelieving enmity, this feels like a trap, a beautiful mirage that’s just going to strand him in the middle of a wasteland all over again.  

But damn, does he want it not to be.  

In the end, Gabriel finds himself right back at the point that led him to take Jack up on the invitation to meet in the first place, unsurprisingly: it’s not that things can’t get any worse than they’ve been for the last six years - things can  _ always _ get worse - but they’ve been bad enough that he knows he’s going to take this chance for them to get better.  He’s going to accept the heartbreakingly potent hope in that kiss and the challenge that it poses, to do things  _ right _ again.  

What good is anything he’s done in the last six years, if he can’t accept this chance for what it is, and pursue it?  

Gabriel shuts the water off, finally, willing something like calm into his bones (the scratching, aching pain was soothed by warm water, though only slightly; it is the background to everything, these days, though, no longer explicitly a hostile presence so much as an annoying roommate, most of the time).  He dries off efficiently, but takes a deep breath of the damp towel before he finally re-dresses in a pair of sweats and a tee and heads back out of the bathroom.  

He smells the dinner he ordered as soon as he opens the bathroom door, Indian food from the little restaurant next door to the hotel (Jack never learned to eat it at the proper level of spicy, but at least he learned to like  _ flavor _ ), but even though Gabriel is hungry, the smell is mostly a footnote to the unexpected rush of emotion at seeing Jack lounging on the bed in a tee shirt that’s a little too tight and a pair of sweatpants that are almost laughably big: it’s a sight that means  _ home _ .  Jack stopped stealing his clothes years before the fall, but when they were younger, it was such a common occurrence that it was a running joke between them, and younger still, between them and their squadmates.  

Jack smiles up at him, eyes crinkling at the corners and holding a wistfulness that says he knows exactly why Gabriel just paused at the sight of him, and that Gabriel can’t look at for long before he flop-rolls onto the bed.  It only takes two heartbeats before they near-simultaneously turn toward one another and end up in a mutual octopus-tangle of limbs, and yeah, if Gabriel still has a soul, he decides he’d be entirely willing to sell it to keep being able to do this.  

Between his resuscitation and earlier today, he can count the moments of physical affection in which he was a participant on one hand: one hug and two fistbumps from Sombra, and one very bemused (on her part) fistbump with Amélie.  (That he remembers each such instance so very clearly used to feel pathetic, but in light of this blazing reminder of what it is to  _ cuddle with Jack, which he has not done in multiple years and has actively avoided remembering as much as humanly possible _ , he decides he can be a little kinder to himself about it.)

“Missed you,” he manages in a murmur.  His voice feels too harsh for soft words these days, but he says them anyway.  

Jack sighs out a breath against his temple that smells like toothpaste and squeezes him a little more tightly; the heat from his body seems to sink into Gabriel’s very core and it is  _ wonderful _ .  “Yeah.  Let’s not… do all that again, huh?”  

_ That _ .  One utterly bland word for multiple years of each thinking the other dead, and then several months of sporadically, if half-heartedly, attempting to kill each other.  Gabriel huffs a short laugh into Jack’s still amply-muscled shoulder.  “No argument from me on that one, Sunshine.”  

He feels, rather than sees, Jack smirk, before he turns back around Gabriel’s teasing from earlier.  “Guess I’m not the only old dog with a new trick.”  

“I’ve totally said that before, asshole.”  

“Maybe once, in a dream.”

Gabriel snorts and elbows him in the side - or tries to, as in their current entwined configuration the most he can manage is a sort of half-body nudge, and Jack laughs.  

Then both their stomachs decide to chime in almost in unison, resulting in more laughter from both men.  

“Right.  Thanks for the reminder,” Jack mutters, eyes rolling as he pulls back six inches or so from the embrace.  “I seem to remember you mentioning dinner and a movie.”  

“That I did.”  

Gabriel disengages with a reluctant sigh, missing the heat already, but they can octopus-grapple some more when Jack’s metabolism isn’t actively threatening mutiny.  (Gabriel’s doesn’t go critical nearly so quickly, any more, or at least not on days when he kills people, and that pattern is robust enough to freak him out a little if he thinks about it too much.  And then  _ laugh at himself _ , because  _ wow _ , but still.)  Jack leans back in to press a kiss against his jaw, and that makes him want to tangle them up all over again anyway, but Jack’s sliding off the other side of the bed and going to collect the take-out for them, so Gabriel fishes around for the TV touchpad to see what their movie options are.  

“Okay, so the ‘oldies’ section has shit from the early 80’s through… looks like about 2020....” he says, scrolling through the options and then flicking on the main screen when Jack looks up.  

“Why do they have  _ Return of the Jedi _ but not the other two original trilogy movies?” Jack grumbles, exactly echoing Gabriel’s thought from five seconds earlier.  

“Because whoever put this together is an incompetent rube and a tease.”  

“No shit.  Oh!  We could watch Episode I, that’s the right time per--”  And Jack cuts himself off with a laugh at the death glare he promptly receives from Gabriel.  “I can’t even suggest that with a straight face.”  

“Well, yeah; your face is always pretty gay,” Gabriel points out helpfully.  

Jack snorts.  “Touché.  What about  _ The Force Awakens _ ?”  

“That’s actually kinda tempting,” despite its level of cinematic action cheese that’s high even by Gabriel’s standards, “but let’s see what else we’ve got.”

Gabriel keeps scrolling, lingering over  _ Les Misérables _ .  Jack never quite picked up Gabriel’s utter adoration for musical theatre, but he liked most of the shows they went to (or far more often, watched recordings or movie adaptations of) together.  

“Too depressing.”  

Yeah, fair enough.  

_ Moulin Rouge _ comes up after another quick scroll.  

“ _ Way _ too depressing.”  

Gabriel chuckles.   _ The Matrix _ is available, but for all it’s a 90s classic, it has lost most of its appeal for the modern viewer in light of the world now having had an  _ actual _ robot war.  If they were going  to watch a Wachowski movie, Gabriel loves  _ Jupiter Ascending _ , but Jack thinks it’s ridiculous and it doesn’t seem to be on the list anyway.  (Which is a shame, because he’s pretty sure he could convince Jack to watch it regardless.  At least it isn’t fucking depressing.)  

_ Captain America: The Winter Soldier _ comes up on the screen, and Gabriel pauses briefly, during which time Jack apparently looks up from dishing out Indian food, because he says “Nope” at about the same time Gabriel mutters “Absolutely not,” which at least results in shared dark laughter.  They watched the Captain America movies together a slightly absurd number of times during and after SEP - it was their running joke for years, but one that started to go sour after Overwatch ended the Crisis and was reorganized.  And  _ Winter Soldier _ in particular is just… Gabriel isn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole right now.  

Seeing  _ Labyrinth _ come up on the list makes him smile, and he considers suggesting it for a moment, before it gives him another idea - which, thankfully, the movie list seems prepared to accommodate.  

“You know what?  Unless you want to veto, we’re watching some goddamn Miyazaki.  We kind of live in an action movie; I don’t need to watch one tonight.”  He has already found  _ Howl’s Moving Castle _ , which is exactly what he wanted.  

Jack lets out a low laugh and hands Gabriel an improvised take-out carton plate filled with fragrant, still-steaming food, settling in next to him with his own.  “Works for me.”  

 

* * *

 

Jack only vaguely remembers the movie Gabriel has selected, but he laughs anyway because what he remembers is enough - Howl is a manic pixie edgelord who reminded him of Gabriel within the first five minutes of the film the time they watched it together all those years ago, and  _ that _ impression has certainly stuck even if very little of the rest of the film did at the time.  

The giant terror-bird imagery, which he most definitely did not remember, makes him laugh somewhat inappropriately given the mood of that point in the movie.  Oh well - of all the things that they could be watching tonight that are kind of ridiculously relatable in some way, this is the gentlest, the most hopeful.  The right choice for the night.  

The Indian food is pretty good and Gabriel’s company in eating it (even though of course he muttered a few complaints about the spice level, which is of course set to Jack’s tastes rather than his) is excellent.  Jack is still getting used to the relative coolness of Gabriel’s body compared to his own, given how dramatic the difference always used to be in the other direction, but it’s not bad.  Just different - and a subtle reminder that this is  _ real here and now _ , rather than some wistful figment of Jack’s imagination or vivid dream of the past.  

Gabriel has changed; they both have changed, but here they are, together.  

When the movie ends, their food cartons have been long-since set aside, and Jack is draped partially over Gabriel’s body with one eye on the screen and Gabriel’s strong arm wrapped around his back, holding him close.  

“Good choice,” Jack murmurs, lifting his head enough to look at Gabriel’s face and smiling slightly.  

“Miyazaki’s pretty much never a bad idea,” Gabriel rumbles back in agreement.  “...Unless you want something happy but end up watching  _ Grave of the Fireflies _ , I guess, because you don’t know any better.”  

Jack doesn’t, in fact, know any better, but he’ll take Gabe’s word for it, as is usual when it comes to media.  Instead of replying, he leans up to brush his lips against the other man’s, feelling bristly grey whiskers rasp pleasantly against his own scarred skin as Gabriel catches the kiss and deepens it.  

The post-resuscitation chill is still noticeable but less prominent here, and Jack slides his tongue greedily into the warmth of Gabriel’s mouth as his hand tightens at Gabriel’s hip.  Gabriel growls softly, and then there are strong fingers in Jack’s cropped hair, and he doesn’t bother to try to stop the groan that escapes his throat at that, his eyes sliding closed and head tilting back ever so slightly in response to that tug.  

A warm but frantic sort of haze descends upon his mind, defined edges of thoughts melting into a fluid mess of  _ relief  _ and  _ affection _ and  _ lust _ and  _ longing _ .  The kiss earlier was wonderful, a homecoming long-awaited and until recently, little hoped-for.  

This one is  _ fire _ .  

It almost takes Jack by surprise despite the fact that he would never expect less from Gabriel, from the two of them, when they are in sync.  It’s been so long since he’s even let himself remember this aspect of their relationship, let alone experienced it, but here they are, and he prays to any god who might be listening that it’s real, that he can truly have this back.  

Since he is already half on top of Gabriel from cuddling, he pushes himself up after a few moments, swinging a leg over to straddle that muscular waist and deepening the kiss still further, pressing Gabriel down into the pillow with the force of it.  He feels broad hands on his hips, fingertips digging in and teeth scraping against his lower lip and he shudders, needy, wanting.  The light pressure of Gabriel’s waking arousal against the back of his ass sends his head spinning, interest sharpening into the keen hunger of one who has just been reminded that sustenance might be available after a long famine.  

“Gabe,” he whispers, kissing at the sharp jawline and just beneath it as he grinds back a little bit against the other man’s growing erection.  Tension threads through the powerful body beneath him, and he wonders if Gabriel might be about to flip them over suddenly - wouldn’t be the first, tenth, or hundredth time that has happened if he did.  

Gabriel doesn’t, though, so he slides a hand beneath the already rucked-up hem of Gabriel’s shirt and pushes it up along the flat, scarred planes of his chest.  “I missed you so much,” he breathes into Gabe’s ear, shameless in a way he hadn’t been at first, all those years ago.  “I want to feel you…”  

That tension in Gabriel increases and Jack smiles, because it’s always made him almost ridiculously happy to be able to rile Gabriel up, and he nips at his earlobe because he can.  

Gabriel’s left hand moves up to his hair and he sighs with pleasure - then blinks in confusion as that hand gently tugs his head backward.  There is a stillness in Gabriel’s form, now, that makes his stomach drop unpleasantly, and the weighted hesitancy in Gabriel’s voice as he speaks a moment later makes it tie itself promptly into a knot.  “Jack…”  Black eyes stare up at him, gentle and pained, and Jack has to close his own for a moment.  

“I’m sorry,” he rasps, not entirely knowing what he’s apologizing for, exactly, but feeling like he should.  

“Hey.  Look…”  It’s not a command meant literally, but he does look anyway - then looks away because his eyes are burning.  “I’m not saying never.  I want this; I want  _ us _ , okay?  But I can’t… go this far, not tonight.”  

Even after decades of knowing how his own brain works, of being fully aware of how it latches on to negative words and twists them into  _ I don’t want you, you’re not good enough _ no matter how much someone doesn’t mean that, Jack still feels it - the sick, gut-punch sense of rejection from the person he loves most in the world.  Somehow this is different from Gabriel’s righteous anger -  _ that _ he could handle exactly as it was expressed.  It had  _ hurt _ , sure, but it had hurt in exactly the way it was supposed to.  Not like this.  He wants to run out of the room and not come back, he wants to yell at Gabriel not to fucking toy with him, he wants to bury his face in Gabriel’s neck and cry.  

_ Stop it. _

But because he  _ does _ know how his own brain works, and as importantly, knows  _ Gabriel _ , he doesn’t.  This isn’t about Jack’s demons right now.  

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, still not quite able to look at Gabriel, and nods, forcing himself to smile slightly.  “Okay.  That’s fair.”  And then he risks a quick look down to press a soft, chaste kiss to Gabe’s temple and adds, “I’ll be right back.”  

And because Gabriel knows him just as well, he doesn’t question it as Jack retreats from the bed and to the bathroom without any further explanation.  The water from the sink is warm, soothing over Jack’s hands, and then on his face, calming him down and washing away the tears he didn’t quite shed out in the bedroom.  

He doesn’t know the exact reason for Gabriel’s physical reticence, but he has a few guesses, and whether Gabriel ends up telling him or not, he’s going to hold onto the  _ right _ parts of what Gabriel said - “ _ I want this; I want  _ us” - and things will be okay.  He’s pretty sure Gabriel Reyes has literally never flat-out lied to sugarcoat a rejection, so those words must be true.  

And when he goes back out into the main room with a dry face and a smile, the immediate, warm fierceness of the embrace that Gabe pulls him back into on the bed makes Jack believe that all the more.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're confused about what, exactly, is going on for Gabriel, that will get spelled out more clearly in the next chapter. 
> 
> As always, I endlessly appreciate the kudos and comments, and if you want to come flail about these two assholes some more with me on tumblr, you can find me there at dreamerinsilico.tumblr.com. :)


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The edgy dads continue to practice using their words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to [AndyAO3](http://archiveofourown.org/users/andyao3) (logicalfangirl on tumblr) for her help and idea-bouncing with me on this chapter.

Gabriel wonders, amidst the deep wash of relief when Jack accepts the boundary he’s setting for tonight without pushing, if Jack felt the same sense of a tipping point as he did, just now.  There’s knowing you want to do something, and then there’s knowing that it’s a good idea, and those are most definitely not always the same thing, but in this case… Gabriel is at least reasonably sure that they are, just now.  

When Jack comes back to the bed from the bathroom, he is able to relax in a way that he has not in hours.  

In  _ years _ .  

He feels a similar relaxation in Jack - more comfort, less desperation.  The idea that they might even dare to be happy again, eventually.  He runs blunt fingertips through cropped white hair and down the line of Jack’s spine, and Jack shivers a little and nuzzles closer.  

Jack doesn’t ask, but eventually Gabriel finds himself speaking, voice a rasping murmur.  “For a long time, I think, we fucked instead of talking.  To keep from having to.”  And physical communication was easy - until it wasn’t.  Sometimes they’d needed more than the visceral reminder that they were a matched set.  

“Yeah, guess we did,” Jack replies softly - or as softly as sooty gravel can really get, anyway.  “And then when we had to talk, we didn’t know how.”  

“Yeah.”  

“I don’t wanna do that again, either.”  

“Then let’s remember that.”  

The assent is a sigh, punctuated by a tightening of Jack’s arms around him.  “Yeah.”  A pause.  “There’s more to it, though, isn’t there?”  

_ Shit.   _

And of course he tenses up, and  _ of course _ Jack notices.  He props himself up on an elbow and tugs Gabriel’s face toward him gently.  “Gabe… what are you afraid of?”  

_ SHIT. _

Gabriel could laugh.  Does laugh, shortly, the sound barely-there.  Apparently he doesn’t get to be hypocritical by holding this in when he was just talking about how they should talk about their shit.  It fucking figures.  

Fine, then.  Might as well start out this new era of Talking About Shit by immediately hauling out the single darkest truth of this relationship, per Gabriel’s perspective.  

 

...

 

_ “Jack, there was something seriously fucked with that mission.  Not in the way I can put into a report.”  Gabriel runs a hand over his beanie, frustrated.  “Remember the couple of missions right before we homed in on Eris?  Like that.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but…”   _

_ Jack looks tousled and exhausted, as if he, not Gabriel, is the one who has just returned from a mostly-unsuccessful engagement.  “We’re not dealing with god programs any more, Gabriel; these were garden-variety human terrorists with an outpost, and way too much collateral damage, and the Australian PM chewing on my ass about it.  She’s literally talking court martials for individual agents involved in the Melbourne explosion right now.”   _

_ “We need counterintel.”   _

_ “We need this not to blow up in our faces any more than it already has.”   _

_ He grinds his teeth together, but he nods once, jerkily.  “What do you need from me?”   _

_ When he brings up the mission and his concerns about it again three days later, when the diplomatic thunderstorm has effectively blown over, Jack pulls him close and buries his face in Gabriel’s neck.  “I’m so sorry, Gabe.  I’m supposed to be dealing with the politics so you don’t have to; I shouldn’t have brought up the Prime Minister…”   _

_ And then somehow he’s comforting Jack about that, and assuring him he absolutely should let Gabriel know what’s going on with the public front, that he wants to help, and Gabriel’s uncomfortable, nebulous thoughts about what went wrong with mission never quite manage to come up. _

 

_... _

 

“You, Sunshine,” he sighs in return, eventually.  “You.”

Jack is silent for a long moment, during which the tension in Gabriel redoubles, but then…  

“What can I do to help with that?”  The question is low, strained, quiet, and it hits Gabriel in the chest like he’s tried to body-check a hypertrain because it is  _ exactly the right one, for once _ .  

He can’t help it; he shudders and noses into Jack’s neck, breathing him in and riding out the wave of brittle, full-body pain that accompanies anything approaching an impulse to cry, these days.  “Keep asking me that,” he says finally, huskily.  “And just… today… this has been good.  Better than I’d have ever hoped.”  

He can’t bring himself to try to articulate it in more detail than that, right now, but just the fact that Jack has asked him that question - it makes him confident in a way he’s never been before that he will be able to say what needs saying in the future.  That if nothing else, he’ll be able to reference this conversation and keep them focused on the issues they need to be focusing on, rather than staking everything on their ability to use affection as a substitute for problem-solving.  

“Okay.”  He can feel Jack’s tentative smile as well as hear it, and then he can feel it, as well, as he presses their lips together and soaks in the warmth of his partner.  

It’s so good to use that word in his head again.  

 

* * *

 

Jack goes to sleep in Gabriel’s arms, relief settling in bone-deep and then bowing to exhaustion, which tugs him into the kind of sleep he never really gets anymore - the kind of sleep he hasn’t had since the last time they were together like this, really.  What Gabriel said about being afraid of him is, itself, frightening, but Jack is used to hard truths stated in anger, usually while Gabriel’s drawing even deeper into his hardened shell.  He isn’t used to the softness, or the implicit hope that such a truth might be changed, and he sinks into that softness as if it’s the best blanket in existence.  

He wakes alone, with tears in his eyes before they’re even open, and a clawing dread that progresses to certainty that the previous day was a particularly painfully-rosy specimen of his usual altogether-too-damn-vivid dreams.  

 

...

 

_ It has been three months since the explosion, and some part of his brain has, for whatever reason, decided that if Gabriel miraculously survived (despite evidence to the contrary), now is about the time he should be surfacing.  In the daytime, Jack forces those fantasies from his mind: they’re ridiculous and he has other things to focus on.   _

_ But at night, he’s had a dozen reunions with Gabriel - mostly as bitter as they are sweet, but all leaving him with a brief, blissful sense of relief which immediately melts into renewed horror as he wakes up and realizes it was a dream.  He can’t even become numb to the idea that Gabriel is dead.  Can’t process it, because he has to re-experience the knowledge as new every time he has one of those dreams.  It happened when Ana died, a few times, but this… this is a whole new level of horrible.   _

_ Sleeping pills, when he gets his hands on a few, only make the dreams more vivid, more immersive.  So he starts sleeping as little as possible, until the third time he almost dies because his reflexes are impaired.   _

_ Large amounts of alcohol on an empty stomach can actually get a supersoldier drunk, with enough effort, and that, at least, finally grants sleep that is uneventful, uncomplicated blackness, sometimes.  It takes all his willpower, once he realizes this, to avoid letting it become a nightly coping mechanism.   _

_ Very slowly, the dreams subside in frequency, if not intensity.  The wound has scabbed over, but he doubts it will ever heal.   _

It’s worse than usual, this time; he can even still smell Gabriel, as if…

He opens his eyes, and then definitely starts crying, albeit with freshly-renewed relief.  

Gabriel, who is definitely still there, has rolled away and thrown off everything but the thin sheet (and even that is only over his legs), as though too warm, and Jack realizes that it makes sense given where his internal thermostat seems to prefer to rest, now.  A supersoldier octopus blanket plus a comforter are a recipe for overheating even if one isn’t normally prone to such.  

Black eyes slit open, then widen briefly as Jack tries to hide his (now, embarrassed) distress, and Gabriel mumbles, reaching out.  “C’mere, Sunshine.  ‘M here.”  

And Jack scoots nearer, shuddering as he leans into Gabriel’s muscular bulk once more, tears leaving damp spots on the soft fabric of his shirt.  

“Dreamed about you, since the explosion, more than a few times,” Jack mumbles by way of explanation.  And Gabriel’s arm tightens around him, as he knows how Jack’s dreams tend to affect him.  

“Dream about me last night?” he asks after a bit.  

Jack huffs softly into his shoulder, lips turning up with his rueful reply.  “Nope.  Slept like a baby last night, for the first time in approximately forever.  But I thought I might’ve, for a second there.”  

“Mmmn,” he hums, then repeats in a rumble.  “I’m here.”  

“I’m glad.”

 

…

 

It’s late in the morning when they finally start moving enough to order room service for breakfast, and even over Belgian waffles and sausage and orange juice (and over-brewed coffee), Jack has a hard time not touching Gabriel - a brush of fingers against a forearm, a press of knee to knee, a glance with enough weight that it might as well be something more - which, thankfully, Gabriel doesn’t seem to mind.  Jack is careful not to startle him with contact the way he accidentally did the day before, and Gabriel practically soaks it in.  Once or twice Jack thinks he might remark on the fact that it, like many other things, is a change of pace for them, but he doesn’t, and that suits Jack just fine.  

For just a few hours, it’s a lazy, almost-perfect morning.  But the rest of the world continues to exist, and so tension returns abruptly in the form of a message from one of Jack’s few contacts.  

“Problem?” Gabriel asks when Jack glares down at his phone, coffee dregs forgotten in his mug.  

It’s technically an opportunity, but given that they haven’t discussed what exactly the hell they’re going to do about apparently having successfully reconciled with one another, it sure feels like one, just now.  

“Not exactly,” Jack grunts.  “Got a tip about some money and probably intel changing hands this evening in Madrid.  If my source is right, it’s something I’ve been looking out for for a while now.”  

It’s too good to pass up.  

He needs to go.  

Gabriel is quiet.   _ Fuck _ .  

They have similar goals, but largely differing methods, and Gabriel certainly has plenty of his own irons in the proverbial fire.  They haven’t worked together in years, and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to go their separate ways and keep pursuing their individual strings of objectives while keeping in touch (and not shooting at each other).  That’s the most conservative, logical conclusion to the last twenty-four hours.  Should they even consider…?

He asks, before he can think about it too much more or talk himself out of it.  “...Come with me?”

Gabriel’s silence holds for long seconds, and eventually Jack grunts and shakes his head a little.  “Sorry.  You’ve - “

“Yes.”  

“Wh-?”  He’s too surprised by the blunt answer to form a full response.    

“Yes, Jack.”  Gabriel’s smile is small, but smug and playful in a way that is utterly himself.  “Can’t have you running off to get your flat ass ambushed again without me, can I?”  

He loves this man,  _ so. damn. much. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Double-update this time because the epilogue is short! Be sure to click through.)


	14. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath, in two parts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [NOW WITH GORGEOUS COVER ART](http://logicalfangirl.tumblr.com/post/158220618520/constellations-of-the-things-we-left-unsaid-so-i) by AndyAO3/logicalfangirl because she's somehow as good at art as she is writing. Seriously, go look at the thing. I am swooning.

There isn’t an ambush, exactly, but the operation does go tits-up in the way that only “too good to pass up” opportunities can, which lands Gabriel and Jack nearly back-to-back in a firefight with a mix of terrorist operatives and Lumerico goons (but hey, they got what they came for, if they can get out with it alive).  

Which in turn progresses to said terrorists and goons being dispatched with hair-trigger, terrifying efficiency in the way that only Gabriel and Jack operating as partners can, even after more than a decade of working apart.  It’s an absolute mess (and Gabriel says as much through gritted teeth at some point) and it is a dance they both know; steps they fall into with an ease that’s breathtaking in its own right as their enemies fall around them.  

The focused adrenaline of the situation almost completely drowns out the pain of existing, for once, to Gabriel, as Jack moves at his side like a phantom limb suddenly restored.  

And when they make it to a safe house with their objective completed and their gear redolent of pulse munitions, gunpowder, and spilled blood, they’re reaching for each other’s masks at the same time and crashing into one another with frantic hunger and something that might be joy.  This, too, is easy, but the smothering weight of fear does not return: this ease is comfort and safety and a reunion viscerally felt.  

Gabriel is pinning Jack to the wall with a kiss (and fingers laced in his, and a knee between his thighs…) when the “I love you” slips out between breaths like a prayer - and perhaps it is one, the first of a great many over the brittle years to be answered.  

 

* * *

 

“You chose not to make contact,” the doctor notes, blue eyes serious and concerned, while Winston taps through files on a console nearby.  

Fareeha Amari, still clad in the dark body glove that lines her Raptora suit, leans down to brush a kiss against Angela’s temple before slumping tiredly into the nearby chair and handing over a data chit from her helmet.  “I took some video footage.  He wasn’t working alone, this time, and I don’t know what to make of it.”  

“Not alone?” Winston echoes, turning his head and looking at her, surprised.  “That’s new.”  

“Not just ‘not alone,’ but to all appearances, he was with - “  There is a soft gasp from Angela beside her as the video footage begins playing.  “Mmhmm.”  

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”  Winston’s voice is disgruntled, eyes narrowing as he catches a look at what drew that reaction.  Potential Overwatch Recruit Soldier 76 is very obviously laying down cover fire for a close-range strike by none other than the Talon agent known as Reaper, who is presently about as far from ‘potential recruit’ as it is possible to get.  

“Obviously we’ve never connected them before, but if you keep watching, it was actually very impressive how well they worked together.  Intel to the contrary aside, I’d think they’d done it before,” Fareeha replies, then frowns as she notices Angela.  

Angela is staring intently at the screen, her posture rigid and expression stricken.  

“Angela?”  

The doctor hisses a curse under her breath and rubs at the bridge of her nose.  “They have,” she says after a moment, reluctantly.  “Worked together before.  I am certain I have seen them do so.”  

“Um, when?”  

There is a long pause before Angela finally looks away from the video and back at her.  “In Overwatch, before Blackwatch agents stopped participating in the operations of Overwatch proper entirely.”  

“Who would still be active without having gotten the recall?”  Fareeha’s brow wrinkles.  Winston is quiet, just waiting for an explanation.  

“That is Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND THAT'S A WRAP. Thanks everyone for sticking with the fic (especially to long-time readers who had some long waits between chapters); I hope you've enjoyed the ride! 
> 
> The continuity of this fic has grown a lot while I've been writing it, and I'm presently planning multiple other fics to follow, with various ships as their focus (including more Reaper76), so subscribe to the Constellations series if you're interested in that! 
> 
> Finally, I love interacting with other people about Overwatch stuff, and if you'd like to find me on Tumblr, I'm dreamerinsilico over there, as well. :)


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